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Learned helplessness matters because it offers a psychological model for why some people stop trying to escape or improve a bad situation even once escape becomes genuinely possible, and it underpins one influential model of depression. Seligman's original experiments showed that animals exposed to uncontrollable aversive events (unpleasant experiences the animal cannot influence or stop) later failed to attempt escape even when escape became possible, as if they had learned that their actions made no difference. For example, imagine a dog repeatedly given inescapable shocks, when later placed somewhere it could easily escape a further shock, it simply stayed and endured it rather than trying to leave.

The theory was later reformulated attributionally. This version proposes that whether uncontrollable failure leads to helplessness, and depression, depends on a person's explanatory, or attributional, style. A pessimistic style explains bad events as internal (caused by themselves), stable (unlikely to change), and global (affecting many areas of life), and is linked to greater vulnerability to depression. This links closely to locus of control (the degree to which a person believes outcomes are within their own control, internal, versus outside it, external). For example, imagine a patient who fails one exam and concludes: 'I am fundamentally stupid, this will never change, and it affects everything I do.' That internal-stable-global attributional pattern is exactly the pessimistic style linked to learned helplessness and depression risk. In practice, this means therapy targeting depression, such as cognitive behavioural therapy, often works partly by challenging this pessimistic attributional style directly, encouraging more specific, changeable, external explanations for setbacks where accurate.

• In the reformulated model, which attribution for a bad event most predicts loss of self-esteem?
• Into which later theory of depression did the learned helplessness model develop?
• How has the original interpretation of the animal experiments since been revised?

• Learned helplessness, failure to attempt escape after uncontrollable aversive events, unlike extinction, which is the reduction of a learned response when it is no longer reinforced or paired.
• Pessimistic attributional style, explains bad events as internal, stable, and global, rather than an optimistic style, which explains them as external, unstable, and specific.
• Learned helplessness, a proposed model of depression, whereas locus of control is the broader, related belief about whether outcomes generally lie within or outside one's own control.

• The monoamine theory is a neurochemical account with different origins.
• The dopamine theory concerns psychosis rather than depression.
• Blaming external circumstances protects self-esteem.
• An unstable attribution limits the effect to that occasion.
• A specific attribution limits the effect to one domain.

• Name the learning, social or research principle being tested before reading the options.
• Identify the antecedent, behaviour, consequence or cognitive process in the vignette.
• Compare the direction of effect with the nearest competing principle.
• Apply the same rule to a new example to confirm that the answer transfers.