Table of Contents

Overview - depression, golden girl, anxiety and unpredictability, childhood failure, sudden psychosomatic death; controllability - voluntary responding, response independence and response contingency - the superstition experiments; experimental studies - helplessness saps the motivation to initiate responses - learned helplessness in the dog, the triadic design, motivational deficits in several species, generality of helplessness across situations; helplessness disrupts to ability to learn; helplessness produces emotional disturbance; theory - cure and immunization - the statement of the theory, motivational disturbance, cognitive disturbance, emotional disturbance; cure and prevention - limits on helplessness; alternative theories - competing motor responses, adaptation, emotional exhaustion, and sensitization; physiological approaches to helplessness; depression - types of depression; the learned-helplessness model of depression - ground rules, symptoms of depression and learned helplessness, etiology of depression and learned helplessness, a speculation about success and depression, cure of depression and learned helplessness, prevention of depression and learned helplessness; anxiety and unpredictability - definition of unpredictability; anxiety and the safety-signal hypothesis - the safety-signal hypothesis; upredictability and monitoring fear; stomach ulcers; preference for predictability; the relationship of predictability to controllability - self-administration, perceived control; systematic desensitization and uncontrollability; conclusion; emotional development and education - the dance of development - reafference; maternal deprivation; predictability and controllability in childhood and adolescence - the classroom, poverty; death - death from helplessness in animals; death from helplessness in humans - institutionalized helplessness, death from helplessness in old age, infant death and anaclitic depression.