The Neural Correlates Of The Susceptibility Of Learned Helplessness

Control is always considered one of the most important and basic motivations inhuman life. As a general rule, people experience lack of control under a long-termuncontrollable environment, and then exhibit learned helplessness. However, this hasnot been determined to be a consistent finding across participants experiencing thesame uncontrolled environment. In this study, we used functional magnetic resonanceimaging to explore the neural correlates of the susceptibility of learned helplessness.Seventy-seven participants (28=male,49=female) took part in the study.Results indicated that the pattern of brain activation differed dependent on thesusceptibility of learned helplessness. Participants with lower susceptibility showedstronger activation in the bilateral dorsal striatum and left superior temporal gyruscompared to participants with higher susceptibility.Brain functional networks, which was constructed on the basis of graph theory,also differed. Participants with lower susceptibility showed higher clusteringcoefficient and local efficiency compared to participants with higher susceptibility.No significant group differences on characteristic path length and global efficiencywere observed.Finally, there were no significant between group differences for age or sex.There were however overall gender differences, males showed higher susceptibility oflearned helplessness compared to females.