Journal of Abnormal Psychology 1978, Vol. 87, No. 1, 49-74 Learned Helplessness in Humans: Critique and Reformulation Lyn Y. Abramson and Martin E. P. Seligman University of Pennsylvania John D. Teasdale Oxford University, England The learned helplessness hypothesis is criticized and reformulated. The old hypothesis, when applied to learned helplessness in humans, has two major problems: (a) It does not distinguish between cases in which outcomes are uncontrollable for all people and cases in which they are uncontrollable only - for some people (univervsal vs. personal helplessness), and (b) it does not explain when helplessness is general and when specific, or when chronic and when acute. A reformulation based on a revision of attribution theory is pro- posed to resolve these inadequacies. According to the reformulation, once people perceive noncontingency, they attribute their helplessness to a cause. This cause can be stable or unstable, global or specific, and internal or external. The attribution chosen influences whether expectation of future helplessness will be chronic or acute, broad or narrow, and whether helplessness will lower self-esteem or not. The implications of this reformulation of human helplessness for the learned helplessness model of depression are outlined. Over the past 10 years a large number of experiments have shown that a variety of orga- nisms exposed to uncontrollable events often exhibit subsequent disruption of behavior (see Maier & Seligman, 1976, for a review of the infrahuman literature). For example, whereas naive dogs efficiently learn to escape shock by jumping over a barrier in a shuttle box, dogs that first received shocks they could neither avoid nor escape show marked deficits in ac- quisition of a shuttle escape response (Over- mier & Seligman, 1967; Seligman & Maier, This work was supported by U.S. Public Health Service Grant MH-19604, National Science Founda- tion Grant SOC-74 12063, and a Guggenheim fel- lowship to Martin Seligman. We thank Lauren Al- loy, Judy Garber, Suzanne Miller, Frank Irwin, S. J. Rachman, and Paul Eelen for their critical com- ments on earlier drafts of this paper. Ivan Miller (Note 1) has proposed an almost identical reformulation. We believe this work to have been done independently of ours, and it should be so treated. Requests for reprints should be sent to Martin E. P. Seligman, Department of Psychology, University of Pennsylvania, 3815 Walnut Street, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19174. 1967). Paralleling the experimental findings with dogs, the debilitating consequences of uncontrollable events have been demonstrated in cats (Masserman, 1971; Seward & Hum- phrey, 1967; Thomas & Dewald, 1977), in fish (Frumkin & Brookshire, 1969; Padilla, 1973; Padilla, Padilla, Ketterer, & Giacolone, 1970), and in rats (Maier, Albin, & Testa, 1973; Maier & Testa, 197S; Seligman & Beagley, 1975; Seligman, Rosellini, & Kozak, 197S). Finally, the effects of uncontrollable events have been examined in humans (Fosco & Geer, 1971; Gatchel & Proctor, 1976; Glass & Singer, 1972; Hiroto, 1974; Hiroto & Selig- man, 1975; Klein, Fencil-Morse, & Seligman, 1976; Klein & Seligman, 1976; Krantz, Glass, & Snyder, 1974; Miller & Seligman, 1975; Racinskas, 1971; Rodin, 1976; Roth, 1973; Roth & Bootzin, 1974; Roth & Kubal, 1975; Thornton & Jacobs, 1971; among others). Hiroto's experiment (1974) is representative and provides a human analogue to the animal studies. College student volunteers were as- signed to one of three groups. In the con- trollable noise group, subjects received loud noise that they could terminate by pushing Copyright 1978 by the American Psychological Association, Inc. All rights of reproduction in any form reserved. 49