Learned helplessness and its relevance for psychological suffering: a new perspective illustrated with attachment problems, burn-out, and fatigue complaints

ABSTRACT

We develop a new perspective on various forms of psychological suffering – including attachment issues, burn-out, and fatigue complaints – by drawing on the construct of learned helplessness. We conceptualise learned helplessness in operant terms as the behavioural effects of a lack of reinforcement and in goal-directed terms as the dysregulation of goal-directed behaviour. Our central claim is that if one fails to reach a goal (e.g. the goal to secure a job), then not only this goal but also other related goals (e.g. the goal to maintain social relationships) may lose their motivating effects. The similarity relation between goal stimuli can therefore shed light on how failure in one life domain can come to affect various other life domains. We detail the relation between our proposal and existing theories and discuss new research and clinical directions.

KEYWORDS:

• Learning
• motivation
• psychopathology

Acknowledgements

YB thanks Guy Bosmans, Bert Lenaert, and Stefaan Van Damme for interesting discussions about the topics at hand.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 This could be a lack of either negative or positive reinforcement. In the case of negative reinforcement, a response increases in frequency due to the omission of an aversive stimulus. For example, the dogs in the control group of the above-mentioned experiment of Seligman and Maier (1967) were negatively reinforced: If they pressed a panel with their nose, then the shock stimulus was omitted. However, the omission of an aversive stimulus is but one way to reinforce a response. In the case of positive reinforcement, a response increases in frequency because the response results in the presence of an appetitive stimulus. For example, children may increase the frequency of responses that result in attention from their parents. Please note that our conceptualisation is therefore also more broad than definitions of learned helplessness that invoke “uncontrollable negative experiences” as the causal factor, as our conceptualisation also covers uncontrollable positive events.

2 From a goal-directed perspective, failure is a discrepancy between the actual and the desired state. In at least some situations, some level of discrepancy may be tolerated though. Predictive processing theories refer to precision in this context: less precise estimates about the desired (expected) states will lead to less discrepancy (prediction error) with information about actual states than more precise estimates (Van de Cruys et al., 2014).

3 We use the term “goal stimuli”, because we see goals as a special kind of stimuli. Stimuli are entities that evoke a response (operant tradition) and/or that form the input of (further) information processing (cognitive tradition). Outcomes of actions can be conceptualised as stimuli just like events or objects can be conceptualised as such (Hommel et al., 2001). What is typically added for goals is that they are valued stimuli. For these reasons, we define a goal stimulus as a stimulus that is (a representation of) a valued outcome.

4 We see insecure attachment, burn-out and chronic fatigue as clear examples of forms of psychological suffering that can be analysed from the perspective of learned helplessness. We do not mean to say that our analysis cannot be applied to other forms of psychological suffering.

5 A question that may be worth considering is whether the category of attachment-related behaviour is a category of behaviour that needs its own explanatory principles (e.g. working models or secure base scripts) or whether more general principles suffice (e.g. reinforcement or goal-directed action). Perhaps it is the stimulus material rather than the explanatory principles that make attachment-related behaviour special: the discriminative stimulus and/or the goal stimulus cannot just be any stimulus, but concerns the presence of the caregiver or something that is provided by the caregiver.

6 This perspective allows to shed light on the difference between fatigue and sleepiness. Fatigue can be understood as (former) goals no longer inviting responses, while sleepiness can be understood as the goal to go to sleep. Relatedly, it is important to appreciate that our conceptualisation of fatigue might not perfectly overlap with the many ways in which the term is used in daily life – as is often the case in science (Duffy, 1941).

Additional information

Funding

The preparation of this article was made possible by Methusalem grant BOF16/MET_V/002 of Ghent University to JDH and grant FWO19/PDS/041 of the Scientific Research Foundation Flanders to PVD.