ReviewPsychological review2016
Learned helplessness at fifty: Insights from neuroscience.
Review in Psychological review, 2016. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 280 papers, 3 of them syntheses that pooled it.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
280 citing papers in PubMed, 3 syntheses or guidelines pooled it.
- Exploring Determinants of Community Flood Resilience in Southeast Asia: A Systematic Review.International journal of environmental research and public health · 2026Pooled it
- Disempowerment Among Adults With Chronic Illness: A Concept Analysis Using the Walker and Avant Method.Journal of advanced nursing · 2026Pooled it
- Problem Solving and Emotion Coping Styles for Social Anxiety: A Meta-analysis of Chinese Mainland Students.Child psychiatry and human development · 2025Pooled it
- The Use of Behavioral Reconsolidation Interference in Depressive Disorders. A Double-Blinded Randomized Controlled Experimental Registered Report.Psychophysiology · 2026Trial
- Distinct trajectories of perceived control over aversive stimulation predict affective reactions to stressors over and above objective control.Scientific reports · 2025Trial
- Optimizing for happiness in EU technology policy to repay public subsidies for AI.Royal Society open science · 2026Article
- Motivation to exert effort dynamically adapts to reward context and environmental controllability.Cognitive, affective & behavioral neuroscience · 2026Article
- Reframing stress adaptation as a dynamic system failure along a threat-response continuum: towards a phase-specific, mechanism-driven framework.Molecular psychiatry · 2026Article
- Beyond avoidance: negative lying flat and emotional distress among Chinese youth in a 10-day daily diary study.BMC psychology · 2026Article
- Article
- Impaired contingency judgement in mice under ketamine: an implication for an altered sense of agency in schizophrenia.Psychopharmacology · 2026Article
- Preconception Learned Helplessness as a Cognitive Vulnerability to Lower Maternal Bonding Across the Perinatal Period.Journal of clinical medicine · 2026Article
- Inferring brain-wide interactions using data-constrained recurrent neural network models.Neuron · 2026Article
- Brain rhythms of depression: A predictive processing perspective.Trends in neurosciences · 2026Review
- Mediators of the Pain-Depression Relationship in Adults with Chronic Pain: A Systematic Review and Exploratory Meta-Analyses.Journal of clinical medicine · 2026Review
- Mesohabenular glutamatergic regulation of the consequences of uncontrollable stress.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- Errors or Adaptations? A Critical Review of Predictive Processing in Psychiatry.Behavioral sciences (Basel, Switzerland) · 2026Review
- Toward next-generation stress generation research: Expert consensus methodological guidelines.Journal of psychopathology and clinical science · 2026Article
- Determining the relative importance of risk and protective factors for adjustment disorder symptoms during the COVID-19 pandemic by mixed-effects random forests.Psychological medicine · 2026Article
- Uncontrollability of experimental pain decreases pain intensity and relief pleasantness ratings in a between-group design.Pain reports · 2026Article
220 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
2 authors.
Funding
Abstract
Learned helplessness, the failure to escape shock induced by uncontrollable aversive events, was discovered half a century ago. Seligman and Maier (1967) theorized that animals learned that outcomes were independent of their responses-that nothing they did mattered-and that this learning undermined trying to escape. The mechanism of learned helplessness is now very well-charted biologically, and the original theory got it backward. Passivity in response to shock is not learned. It is the default, unlearned response to prolonged aversive events and it is mediated by the serotonergic activity of the dorsal raphe nucleus, which in turn inhibits escape. This passivity can be overcome by learning control, with the activity of the medial prefrontal cortex, which subserves the detection of control leading to the automatic inhibition of the dorsal raphe nucleus. So animals learn that they can control aversive events, but the passive failure to learn to escape is an unlearned reaction to prolonged aversive stimulation. In addition, alterations of the ventromedial prefrontal cortex-dorsal raphe pathway can come to subserve the expectation of control. We speculate that default passivity and the compensating detection and expectation of control may have substantial implications for how to treat depression. (PsycINFO Database Record
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.