1.10 (V) Health is a Skill - Learned Optimism
[MUSIC] We began to believe that learned helplessness might be a laboratory model of human depression. It would be a huge advantage to have depression in the laboratory because then, you can ask what's its brain physiology, how to prevent it, and how to cure it. You can try new drugs on it and the like. So the question was, was this human depression? To ask that question, we looked at the symptoms in DSM three of human Depression. There are nine symptoms. The first is sad mood. The second and hallmark of depression is loss of interest in life, loss of zest, loss of vitality. The third symptom is weight loss. The fourth symptom of depression is sleep disturbance, most typically not trouble getting to sleep at night, which is an anxiety symptom, but rather what's called terminal insomnia. Terminal here means, not that it kills you, it means that you wake up at 4:00 in the morning and you can't get back to sleep typically out of a helplessness dream. The fifth symptom is psychomotor slowness, being slow of speech and slow of motion. The next symptom is fatigue and Fatigability. The next symptom is low self esteem and feelings of worthlessness. The eighth symptom is being indecisive, not being able to make up your mind, not being able to concentrate. And the final symptom, in DSM, is thoughts of suicide and thoughts of death. Now to be diagnosed as a depressive, you need to have five of those nine symptoms for two weeks or more. So those were the symptoms of depression. And then we looked at the helplessness literature in animals and people so we could ask the question: When people got inescapable noise or unsolvable problems, how many of those symptoms occurred? Or when rats got inescapable shock, how many of those symptoms occurred? And the answer was eight out of nine. So the only symptom that doesn't occur in learned helplessness is thoughts of suicide and that's probably because we're using a very mild inescapable event like loud noise or unsolvable cognitive problems. So that pretty much convinced us that learned helplessness was a model of depression. Now that become very important. Once you're convinced that helplessness is a model of depression, two plus two, and that optimism is a protective factor against learned helplessness, or pessimism a risk factor for learned helplessness, that suggests that pessimism and optimism in human beings will be risk factors or protective factors against depression. So we began to do large-scale long-term studies of depression in which, for example, we would take 10 to 12 year old kids and we would measure optimism and pessimism, in hundreds and now thousands of kids, and then we just watched them as they went through puberty. What we found for children and for adults was that pessimistic children had between two and eight times the risk of having moderate to severe depression as they go through puberty, whereas optimistic children are at much less risk. So that was part one. We were able, by measuring optimism and pessimism, to ask the question who's at risk for depression? Then very importantly, we began to ask the question if you taught optimism to kids and adults before depression occurred, could you prevent depression from occurring? At this time, I was working with Aaron Beck on cognitive therapy, and as we looked at cognitive therapy, what one does in cognitive therapy for depression is to take the most pessimistic thoughts that people have- I'm unlovable, I'm stupid, things will never work out- and get people to realistically challenge those thoughts. So for example, you are a 12 year old girl and you walk into the cafeteria and all of your friends are sitting in a different place and they don't ask you to sit with them, and you say to yourself, “no one likes me. I'm a loser.” So what you do with the 12 year old in cognitive therapy is to say, well, what's going on with those girls over there? Maybe they're all members of the volleyball team and I'm not on the volleyball team. So you teach children and adults to dispute their most catastrophic thoughts, and when they dispute their most catastrophic thoughts and become very good arguers against catastrophic thinking, that is the heart of cognitive therapy of depression, the most effective psychological treatment of depression. So that set the stage for asking the question that we'll talk about in the next lecture of what happens if you systematically teach pessimistic children and pessimistic adults the tools of disputing their catastrophizing explanatory style. The short answer is you statistically prevent depression and anxiety.
