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4/9/2020 Activity: ​Learned Helplessness Article Author: Jessica Meisel, ECSE ​ Date: 4/9/2020 ​ Activity: Learned Helplessness Article ​ The author of the article talks about learned helplessness in children who are deaf-blind, but this article is appropriate for any child with a visual impairment as well as children with multiple disabilities. Our children rely on us to help them understand the world around them. They need us to be a bridge to our world, but oftentimes we make the mistake of doing too much for our children because we want them to succeed and we don’t want to see them fail. But doing too much for our children can cause them to become passive, not willing to try new things because they know it will be done for them. Or we are giving too much guidance using our hands over their hands instead of hand under hand guidance, which gives the child the choice to remove their hands from whatever it is they are exploring. Too much hand over hand guidance could lead to tactile defensiveness which makes your child less likely to want to touch anything they are given. I have highlighted the major points below. This is a long article, please don’t feel overwhelmed by it. Pick out the strategies you need and leave the rest. I hope this helps! Best, Jessica Meisel ______________________________________________________________________ AUTHOR: S.B. Marks TITLE: Understanding and Preventing Learned Helplessness in Children Who Are Congenitally Deaf-Blind SOURCE: Journal of Visual Impairment & Blindness 92 200-11 Mr '98 The magazine publisher is the copyright holder of this article and it is reproduced with permission. Further reproduction of this article in violation of the copyright is prohibited. ABSTRACT The absence of both distance senses creates the need for children who are congenitally deaf-blind to rely on others to motivate them to explore and to provide the connections between exploration and communication, which is the foundation of concept development. This article links the literature on learned helplessness with best practices in teaching children who are deaf-blind to address how caregivers and teachers can prevent or reduce learned helplessness in these children. Children who are congenitally deaf-blind are at risk of developing a passivity that is both ​ pervasive and enduring. This learned passivity interferes with the intrinsic drive to achieve, often referred to as mastery motivation (MacTurk & Morgan, 1995). The loss of both distance senses creates the need for children to rely on others to motivate them to explore, for it is the distance senses that motivate the children to move beyond themselves. Young hearing-sighted children see or hear something of interest and want to attain it. Children who are congenitally deaf-blind require adults who understand how to provide supports that motivate them to explore while continuously providing connections between exploration and communication in their preferred form or forms of communication. It is through the connection between exploration and communication that children learn new concepts. Congenitally deaf-blind children need support to learn how to control aspects of their ​ environment through experiential learning; otherwise they will become increasingly more passive in their attempts to interact with the environment. This early passivity, coupled with ​ the children's later learning experiences, sets the stage for the development of learned helplessness. DEFINITIONS LEARNED HELPLESSNESS Seligman (1975) developed the concept of learned helplessness from observations of the behavior of dogs. Seligman administered shock to the dogs and denied them any possibility of escape. Once the dogs understood that they could not stop the shock, they no longer sought to escape because they realized that their actions had no impact on the outcome. This work has been extended to examine what happens to people who are confronted with situations over which they have no control. The effects of learned helplessness are experienced in one or more of the following domains: 1) motivational, 2) affective, and 3) cognitive (Abramson, Seligman, & Teasdale, 1978). When an individual's efforts have little or no impact on the outcome, motivation and ​ subsequent efforts are reduced. The person lacks the motivation to try because trying will ​ make no difference in the outcome. In the most extreme form of this condition, the person does not try to initiate anything. This lack of initiation is the most characteristic behavior of persons who experience learned helplessness (Abramson et al., 1978; Seligman, 1975; Sweeney, 1991). The inability to control or change the outcome may cause the individual to feel depressed ​ and thus has an impact on the affective domain. As the person becomes depressed, he or she is ​ likely to exhibit the behaviors of learned-helplessness. In fact, depressed people are apt to feel that negative events are their fault and to generalize their failure to other situations (Abramson et al., 1978). Under these circumstances, it is difficult to determine whether the depression or the learned helplessness is the precipitating factor. People experience the cognitive effects of learned helplessness as they struggle to figure out "why" they are helpless. The nature and severity of the helplessness is connected to how they think about their helplessness. Seligman (1975) called this thinking a person's attributions. The impact of the uncontrollable outcome is subject to the person's interpretation of his or her personal competence. The individual may think, "Would everyone in this situation be helpless, or is the helplessness unique to me?" Thinking that no one could have an impact on the outcome, or universal helplessness, is not likely to have the same deleterious effects on one's self-esteem as personal helplessness, the belief that you are the only person who cannot affect the outcome (Abramson et al., 1978). Several other concepts are important to understanding how attributions affect the severity and chronicity of learned helplessness. An individual's attributions for his or her lack of control may be internal (ability or effort) or external (difficulty of the task or luck), stable (unlikely to change) or unstable (likely to change), and global (affecting many domains, including the daily living, mathematical, and vocational) or specific (affecting only a particular domain). It is possible to intervene and reduce learned helplessness. However, it is more challenging to do so with persons whose attributions are internal, stable, and global, rather than external, unstable, and specific, because people with the first set of attributions believe that their helplessness comes from within, is unlikely to change, and pervades many areas of their lives (Abramson et al., 1978). TYPES OF HELPLESSNESS Kay (1986) described two kinds of helplessness--inborn passivity and learned helplessness. The concept of inborn passivity may apply to some infants who are congenitally deaf-blind, who are poor feeders and rarely cry or otherwise make demands on the caregiver. Because of the lack of both distance senses, these infants may simply not know who or what to cry for. The loss of both distance senses may also have an impact on a child's persistence. According to Harrel (1984, p. 11), "vision plays a strong role in encouraging continued efforts." Children who are deaf-blind have fewer opportunities to observe the self-initiation and persistence of others, which is the way sighted-hearing children learn to initiate and to persevere in their efforts. Children who are not provided with supports to gain access to such information respond to what they perceive as the expectations of others (Harrel, 1984); that is, they wait for others to tell them what to do before making another attempt. This passivity contributes to their lack of control over their own learning. Children who are congenitally deaf-blind experience almost no incidental learning. ​ Although more than 90 percent of them have some usable vision or hearing (Fredericks & Baldwin, 1987), the information they receive may be fragmented or distorted and hence difficult to interpret. Because neither distance sense is intact, these child have lost many opportunities to learn through observation, both visual and auditory. Congenitally deaf-blind children are dependent on others to set up safe, predictable ​ environments and to support them in making systematic connections to the world outside them. These connections must be continually made by communicating to them in their ​ preferred forms, so they will gain knowledge about the world. In addition, these children must be supported in understanding the cause-and-effect relationships between what they do and what happens to them (Siegel-Causey & Downing, 1987). Persons with learned helplessness often feel a discontinuity between their actions and the resulting outcomes. Caregivers and teachers may contribute to the learned helplessness of children who are ​ congenitally deaf-blind by overgeneralizing their supportive role to situations where support is unnecessary and the children could perform independently. They may misinterpret the ​ children's need for connections to be a need for direction. As a result, the children get a global impression of their dependence, which may reduce their control over their learning experiences. This loss of control is the critical element in the development of learned helplessness (Dudley-Marling, Snider, & Tarver, 1982). Adults may have different expectations for children who are congenitally deaf-blind.
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