Perspectivas em análise do comportamento
On-line version ISSN 2177-3548
Abstract
JUNIOR, Amilcar Rodrigues Fonseca; PICKART, Tataína Iara Moreno and CASTELLI, Maria Cristina Zago. Methodological implications for learned helplessness studies in humans. Perspectivas [online]. 2011, vol.2, n.1, pp.46-52. ISSN 2177-3548.
Learned helplessness can be defined as a difficulty in learning found in subjects who had a history with uncontrollable stimuli. In the study of this phenomenon in humans, some specific aspects related to experimental control can interfere with the data acquisition and data analysis. Those aspects are: the stimulus employed in pretreatment; the task used in testing (generally anagram solution testing); and, finally, the uncontrollability condition and its ethical issues. Those aspects were critically discussed in this article, taking into account their implications for data analysis.
Keywords : learned helplessness in humans; methodological issues; anagrams; ethical issues.