Learned helplessness refers to the maladaptive passivity shown by animals and people following experience with uncontrollable events. Learned helplessness also refers to the cognitive explanation of this phenomenon. The individual learns in one situation that responses and outcomes are independent, represents this learning as an expectation of helplessness, and then generalizes this expectation to other situations in which outcomes objectively can be controlled to produce passivity. Learned helplessness has been extensively studied as an analogue of such significant human problems as depression, failure, and susceptibility to illness. An important influence on the degree of helplessness shown by people is how they explain the causes of the original uncontrollable events. Individuals who tend to explain such events with internal (‘it's me’), stable (‘it's going to last forever’), and global (‘it's going to undermine everything’) are said to have a helpless or pessimistic explanatory style. Current lines of research in learned helplessness include investigations of the biochemical substrate of the phenomenon, cross-cultural differences in its manifestation, and strategies for immunizing children against helplessness and its negative consequences.