What is Learned Helplessness?
The term learned helplessness describes a situation where someone has, through their parenting or other influences, learned to pretend they are helpless and cannot do anything for themselves.
The impact of learned helplessness has been demonstrated in a number of different animal species, but its effects can also be seen in people. Consider one often-used example: A child who performs poorly on math tests and assignments will quickly begin to feel that nothing he does will have any effect on his math performance. When later faced with any type of math-related task, he may experience a sense of helplessness.
Learned helplessness has also been associated with several different psychological disorders. Depression, anxiety, phobias, shyness and loneliness can all be exacerbated by learned helplessness. For example, a woman who feels shy in social situations may eventually begin to feel that there is nothing she can do to overcome her symptoms.
This sense that her symptoms are out of her direct control may lead her to stop trying to engage herself in social situations, thus making her shyness even more pronounced.
One of the most respected researchers in healthy attitudes is Martin Seligman, Ph.D. , psychologist and author of Learned Optimism. Dr. Seligman studied a condition called "learned helplessness."
He found that when dogs were given unavoidable, inescapable shocks, they seemed to give up even trying to escape future shocks. That is, when they were given a chance to escape the shocks by jumping over a low barrier, they acted helpless and continued to accept the shocks. It was as if the dogs actually learned to be helpless.
If the animals had the chance to escape from the start, they did not give up when they received future shocks; they did not become helpless. Instead, they figured out a way to escape the shocks. Using his observations on learned helplessness, Dr. Seligman created a scale to measure this characteristic in humans.
He then devised an experiment where he rated 172 undergraduates for learned helplessness. Using this scale, he was able to accurately predict which students would become sick in the subsequent six months. In another study of 13 patients with malignant melanoma, he showed that the absence of learned helplessness was a better predictor of survival than the level of NKCA (Natural Killer Cell Activity), an important immune predictor in the bloodstream.
I cant really gove you an answer,but what I can give you is a way to a solution, that is you have to find the anglde that you relate to or peaks your interest. A good paper is one that people get drawn into because it reaches them ln some way.As for me WW11 to me, I think of the holocaust and the effect it had on the survivors, their families and those who stood by and did nothing until it was too late.
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