Failure to escape shock following repeated exposure to inescapable shock

Abstract

Weiss, Glazer, and Pohorecky (1975) reported that repeated sessions of uncontrollable stressors fail to produce an escape learning deficit in the rat. This finding is unexpected in view of the often reported learned helplessness findings where a deficit in escape learning is found following a single session of uncontrollable shock. The discrepancy between these two sets of results may be due to procedural differences. The present experiment tests whether the usual parameters for producing learned helplessness in the rat produce escape deficits after repeated sessions. The results showed that an escape learning deficit is obtained, as expected, after repeated exposure to inescapable shock. The phenomenon reported by Weiss et al. (1975) appears to be different in kind from learned helplessness. © 1976, The Psychonomic Society, Inc.. All rights reserved.