1.07 (V) Seeds of Flourishing - The Personal in Parallel with a Developing New F
[MUSIC] And so now I turn to my personal history and the question of how positive psychology came about in my own life, and then, in parallel, how it happened in psychology as a whole. So, I enter the University of Pennsylvania as a graduate student in 1964 and I was part of a group that discovered something called learned helplessness. So I am starting by telling you about my immersion in the question of suffering. The reason I went into psychology, Had positive psychology existed in 1964, that's really what I always wanted to do. But as I've said, nothing remotely like that existed. The closest thing that existed, if one was interested in the human condition and bettering the human condition, was not a science of building well-being, but there was a science in the practice of reducing misery. So I came to Psychology looking for experimental models of misery, So that I could cure it and prevent it and understand the brain physiology of it. So, in 1964 and 1965, Steven Maier, Bruce Overmeier and I discover the phenomenon called Learned Helplessness. And what learned helplessness was, in Richard Solomon's laboratory where I entered as a graduate student, they were working with dogs and mild to moderate electric shock. They wanted to know how Pavlovian conditioning with a tone followed by a shock later affected learning. And there was a huge problem in the laboratory when I arrived in that the dogs who had had Pavlovian conditioning with tones paired with mild-to-moderate shock, When you took them to a new situation, A shuttle box in which they could jump over and escape shock, they didn't. They just lay there. The question was, what was going on? And so Steve Maier and I said the strange thing about Pavlovian conditioning, which no one seemed to notice: If you pair, as Pavlov did, a metronome with food to the mouth, nothing the dog does affects the food. It escaped the notice of learning fears. But, in Pavlovian conditioning, if you have a metronome paired with food to the mouth, and the dog learns to salivate to the metronome, Whether or not it salivates, it doesn't affect whether or not the food occurs. Similarly, if you have a tone paired with shock, and you want to know if the animal becomes fearful of the tone, it escaped everyone's notice that there's nothing you can do about the shock. The shock comes whether or not you're afraid. So, Steve Maier and I wondered, whether or not more important than Pavlovian conditioning was learning that nothing you did mattered. That's what defines Pavlovian conditioning. So what we did was to ask the question, as far as the controllability over your environment: Is it learned? And how does it affect later behavior? So what we did was to take three groups of dogs, and then rats, and then people, and the three groups consisted of the following: one group got a shock, mild to moderate, that was inescapable, five seconds long. Nothing you did mattered. Second group got exactly the same shock, But every time it pressed the panel with its nose, the shock went off, so it could do something about the shock. And a third group got nothing. Clear? Okay, then 24 hours later, we took the dogs, the rats, and the people to a shuttle box. In which all you need to do is jump over a small barrier to get out of shock. And what happened was, as Dick Solomon's people had found, If you had prior inescapable shock, you just lay there and didn't do anything. If you had exactly the same shock, but you learned to turn it off with your nose, you just jumped over the barrier and never got shocked again. And that's what happened to animals who had no shock. So the crucial ingredient that was going on that no one had recognized before, was how much control do you have over bad events in life? If you have control, if you can do something about it, then you behave normally. If you have bad events, but you can't do anything about it, then you collapse. You fail to escape, and you fail to learn. I should tell you that I'm an animal lover and dogs have played a major role in my life, so it was with great relief, that as soon as possible in the early 1970's, I stopped doing animal experiments and turned to helplessness in human beings. The first thing we needed to find out was whether or not the same thing happened in people. And it turns out that it does in almost identical fashion. So what we did in situation one, you have a button in front of you, loud noise goes on. if you press the button, loud noise goes off. You can control it. A second group gets exactly the same loud noise, but pressing the button doesn't work. Nothing they do matters. A third group gets nothing. Then the next day they get taken to a human shuttle box, and they put their hand on one side, loud noise goes on. Move your hand to the other side, loud noise goes off. Same thing occurred. People who had escapable noise learned very readily to escape in the new situation. People who had inescapable noise just sit there and don't do anything at all. So we found the very same thing happening with human beings and that began a field of human helplessness in which we could ask how to prevent it, what drugs worked on it, what the brain physiology was, as well. So by this time, we thought we understood the mechanism of learned helplessness. Basically, when bad things happen to you and nothing you do matters, you don't try. It undermines trying. It undermines voluntary response initiation. That's the key to helplessness: If you had the same bad event. Trauma itself does not produce helplessness, it's inescapable trauma that produces helplessness. Well, there was a troubling fact about learned helplessness that had been omitted up until this point, and this is a factor that leads, crucially, to positive psychology.
