A Study On The Induction Of Learned Helplessness And Its Antecedent And Outcome Variables

Learned helplessness is a negative emotion that we often experience in our lives.Generally speaking,when people suffer many setbacks and failures,thinking that no matter how hard they try,they cannot change the results of failure,learned helplessness occurs,so in order to avoid suffering another disappointment,people do not hope for the solution of the problem and are unwilling to make any further efforts.In recent years,there have been more and more studies on learned helplessness,but there are few empirical studies and uneven distribution,mainly focusing on students’ academic or single-subject learning,people know little about the psychophysiology of experiencing helplessness,and there is a lack of systematic combing of the relationship between the antecedents of learned helplessness and the outcome variables.This paper conducts experiments on the main research results of learned helplessness at home and abroad,conducts research in laboratory situations with the help of biofeedback,explores the activation effect of the two antecedent variables of interpersonal relationship assessment and attribution mode on learned helplessness,and the two outcome variables of help-seeking motivation and helpful behavior after the activation of learned helplessness,and puts forward the limitations of existing research and future research directions.Study 1:Study on the effectiveness of learned helplessness activation.The adaptive human version of the learned helplessness(LH)paradigm was used to test the effectiveness of helpless emotional activation in this study.The experiment arranged a fake subject as the real participant’s off-site helper,and told the real subject before the experiment that he could ask for help from the off-site personnel if he encountered rare words that he could not recognize during the experiment,setting the success rate of the real subject’s help to 10%,and it took 5-10 seconds to wait for help after help,and stimulate the learned helplessness of the real subject through multiple failed help.According to the physiological indicators collected by the biofeedback instrument,the number of requests for help before and after,and the emotional word choice questionnaire,the effectiveness of the subject’s target emotional activation was tested.The results showed that the BVP amplitude of participants with unhelpful activation levels decreased significantly,and the frequency of SC and BVP increased significantly,while there was no significant difference in Temp.Among the number of requests for help in the pre-and post-test tests,the number of helpless emotions was significantly lower than that in the pre-test,and the participants reported obvious helplessness in the emotional word choice questionnaire.Study 2:Study of precursor variables of learned helpless activation.On the basis of helplessness activation,two experiments were carried out by combining the questionnaire with the PsychoPy experimental program to explore the effects of interpersonal relationship assessment and attribution on the activation of learned helplessness.Experiment 1 used the experimental design between the participants,and set up two groups of participants,familiar group and unfamiliar group,to induce helplessness task,and test the difference in helplessness activation between the two groups.The results showed that the familiar group participants were more likely to stimulate learned helplessness and had a deeper degree of helplessness.Experiment 2 used the experimental design between participants to explore the difference in the activation degree of helpless emotions in individuals using optimism and pessimism.Through the analysis of the difference in the amount of physiological index changes,it was found that individuals who used pessimistic attribution had a deeper degree of activation of learned helplessness than optimistic methods.Study 3:Study of the outcome variables of learned helpless activation.On the basis of helplessness activation,PsychoPy was used to write experimental programs to determine the effects of helplessness on individual helping behavior and motivation to help.Experiment 1 adopts a mixed experimental design of 2×2,and a control group is added based on the participants in Experiment 1,and after completing the helplessness-induced task,the setting can help the next participant reduce the difficulty of the game by answering questions,and explore the differences in helpless group and control group individuals in helping behavior and whether there is interaction between groups and attribution methods.The results showed that:(1)the helpless group had significantly lower helpful behaviors than those in the control group;(2)Group and attribution methods interact significantly on individuals’ helpful behavior.Experiment 2 used the single-factor inter-participant experimental design to judge the motivation of seeking help according to whether the participants chose to seek help when they saw the dilemma picture and the total number of help,and explored the influence of learned helplessness on the individual’s motivation to seek help.The results showed that the motivation of participants in the helpless group was significantly lower than that in the control group.