Helplessness

Have you ever seen a situation where an animal is repeatedly put in a negative situation that it can't escape Eventually, the animal will stop trying to avoid the source of the problem. Instead, it starts behaving as if it's completely helpless to change the situation. Well, this state of limited control is called learned helplessness. Now, the animal has opportunities to escape from this environment, but the learned helplessness prevents it taking any action. We've seen it in a number of different animal species, but we also see this behaviour in people. So, for example, a child who does poorly on maths tests will quickly begin to feel that nothing he does will have any effect on his performance. Then later, when that same child is faced with any maths task, he's probably going to experience that same feeling of helplessness on another occasion. What this means is that small problems can often become much worse because of this.