Abstract
The availability of an effective coping response has been shown to attenuate the deleterious behavioral and physiological consequences of inescapable electric shock. In the current study, two groups of rats could escape tailshock by turning a wheel. When short-latency responses that appeared to be elicited by shock onset were permitted to terminate shock, rats subsequently failed to learn to escape in a shuttlebox and did not differ from rats which received an equivalent amount of inescapable shock. However, when a relatively long-latency response was required and short-latency responses were not allowed to affect shock, rats subsequently readily learned to escape in the shuttlebox. The implications of these results for explanations of the manner in which prior exposure to shock influences subsequent escape learning were discussed.
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Maier, S. F., Jackson, R. L., Tomie, A., & Rapaport, P. M.How to get learned helplessness in rats. Paper presented at the meetings of the Psychonomic Society, Denver, 1975.
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This research was supported by Grant MH 26827 to Steven F. Maier from the National Institute of Mental Health.
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Maier, S.F., Jackson, R.L. The nature of the initial coping response and the learned helplessness effect. Animal Learning & Behavior 5, 407–414 (1977). https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03209588
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03209588