Advances in Environmental Psychology

Volume 2: Applications of Personal Control

A. Baum, J. E. Singer, Jerome L. Singer

• Publisher: Psychology Press
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780898590180
• eBook ISBN: 9781134916658
• Topic: Psychologie
• Subtopic: Histoire et théorie en psychologie

How do people manage their environments? What processes are basic to the interactions between people and their environments? These questions are central to almost all areas of psychology but in a more narrow sense are the heart of environmental psychology. Some environmental studies focus on the antecedents of person-environment interactions, others on the effects of the environment on the individual, and others on outcomes. Still others focus on the processes by which people attempt to manipulate their surroundings. This volume, the second in a series, is concerned with one of these processes - control, actual and perceived, that individuals exercise over their environment.

1	Perceived Control: A Review and Evaluation of Therapeutic Implications

Robert J. Gatchel
Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences

In this chapter, evidence is reviewed that indicates that individuals react differently to stressful events that they perceive can be personally controlled than to those perceived not in their control. A rapidly growing literature has shown that perceived controllability/uncontrollability significantly affects self-report, overt motor, and physiological components of behavior elicited by a stressor. In the present discussion of this concept, perceived control is defined simply as the subject's perception of a contingency between the performance of some behavior and the ability to avoid or escape a stressful, unpleasant event. Perceived uncontrollability, in contrast, is the perception of no contingency between one's responding and avoidance/escape outcomes. After a review of the evidence of the important impact that this concept of perceived controllability/uncontrollability has on behavior, it is shown how this factor appears to be an active ingredient in behavior therapy techniques directed at the treatment of fear and anxiety.

EARLY STUDIES OF PERCEIVED CONTROL

Through the years, there has been anecdotal material reported in the literature to suggest that the lack of control over aversive events can lead to some rather dramatic negative consequences. For example, Bettelheim (1943) described the Muselmaner, or walking corpses, in Nazi concentration camps, who—due to an apparent sense of helplessness and lack of control over their aversive life situation—developed apathy and withdrawal, which many times culminated in death due to no known organic cause. Richter (1957), in an investigation employing wild rats, suggested that the perception of noncontrol by these rats in an environment in which they were held captive was primarily responsible for their losing incentive for living and resulted in a phenomenon that he labeled “sudden death.” Seligman (1975) has also more recently documented other apparent instances of this “sudden death” due to perceived uncontrollability over a stressful environment.

The fact that feelings of helplessness and lack of control appear to interfere significantly with the ability to respond adaptively to a stressful situation has often been pointed out by various investigators (e.g., Cofer & Appley, 1964; Janis, 1958; Janis & Leventhal, 1968; Lazarus, 1966). There have been a number of research studies attempting to document objectively the effects of perceived control on behavior, as well as to gain insight into the mechanisms of perceived control. The great bulk of these studies have demonstrated that reduced control over an aversive situation increases negative emotional responding associated with that situation. Averill (1973) and Lefcourt (1973) have provided excellent reviews of many of the early studies on this topic. I briefly review some of this work, after which some of the more recent studies are discussed.

In a classic study demonstrating the stressful effects of uncontrollable shock on rats, Mowrer and Viek (1948) shocked two groups of rats while they were eating. One group of rats could control the shock by performing an instrumental response—jumping into the air; the other group of rats were yoked controls who could not escape the shock by performing some behavior. It was found that the rats who could control the shock responded less fearfully to this aversive situation than the yoked controls.

In other research with animals, it has been demonstrated that persistent exposure of rats to stress (unpredictable or uncontrollable electric shock) led to a significant increase in the ulceration rate in these rats (e.g., Price, 1972; Weiss, 1968, 1971). In passing, it should be noted that a widely publicized earlier study by Brady, Porter, Conrad, and Mason (1958), which became known as the “executive monkey” study, reported that ulcers were not produced in rats exposed to uncontrollable electric shock but only in those who could actively control the occurrence of this stress. Brady and colleagues interpreted these results to suggest that the pressure and responsibility of actively responding and attempting to control stressful events produces ulceration. These data were used to support the popular but unsubstantiated notion that ulcers are more frequent in persons in responsible, high-level executive positions. However, there were a number of major methodological flaws in the design of the Brady study that seriously interfered with the interpretability of these results. Weiss (1968, 1971) has reviewed these problems in design and has demonstrated that the availability of coping responses, with immediate and positive feedback concerning their effectiveness, alleviates stress and produces less ulceration relative to no-control conditions. Thus, research to date indicates that exposure to uncontrollable emotional stress is associated with an increase in gastric secretion and, as a result, an increased probability that stomach ulcerations will occur.

With human subjects, there have been numerous studies also indicating that when subjects believe they can terminate an electric shock, they demonstrate less emotional stress than under conditions in which they are unable to terminate it (Champion, 1950; Corah & Boffa, 1970; Haggard, 1943). In one such study, Staub, Tursky, and Schwartz (1971) demonstrated that subjects who had no predictability or personal control of an electric shock judged a less intense shock as more uncomfortable than did subjects with controllability. They also tolerated significantly fewer shocks.

INVESTIGATIONS OF “LEARNED HELPLESSNESS”

During the past few years, there has been an enormous increase in this type of investigation, which examines the impact of a stressful situation as a function of the degree of personal control over it perceived by a subject. The bulk of this research has focused on a phenomenon that has come to be known as learned helplessness. The concept of learned helplessness was initially developed from a series of studies conducted by Seligman and colleagues on traumatic avoidance learning in dogs (Overmier & Seligman, 1967; Seligman & Maier, 1967). In these studies, it was found that inescapable aversive events presented to the animals resulted in profound interference with subsequent instrumental learning. Learned helplessness was interpreted as a phenomenon that develops when an organism learns that responding and reinforcement (escape) are independent. This learning is assumed to interfere with initiating instrumental responses.

Seligman (1975) has proposed a conditional probability theory to account for this learned helplessness effect. It is beyond the scope of this chapter to evaluate this theoretical account critically. It should be noted, however, that certain investigators have recently questioned the learning principles upon which the learned helplessness phenomenon is assumed to be based (e.g., Levis, 1976).

Regardless of the precise learning principles that underlie the effect, there can be no doubt from the research conducted to date that the lack of control has a significant impact upon cognitive, emotional, and motivational responding in subjects exposed to stressful situations (cf. Seligman, 1975). This has been demonstrated in a wide variety of studies employing both animal and human subjects. For example, in a series of studies from my own laboratory, it has been found that both self-report and physiological measures of emotion are significantly affected by the lack of control over an aversive event. In one study, Gatchel and Proctor (1976b) demonstrated that subjects exposed to a learned helplessness task (inescapable aversive noise) evidenced lower tonic and phasic skin conductance responding relative to nonhelpless and control group subjects. This response pattern was viewed as a concomitant of decreased task involvement and motivation in learned helplessness subjects, which was prompted by their learning that responding and reinforcement (escape) were independent. At the same time, they demonstrated a greater frequency of spontaneous skin conductance fluctuations. Thus, there was evidence for both deactivation responses (lower tonic and phasic skin conductance responses) as well as activation responses (greater spontaneous electrodermal activity). We interpreted these findings of fractionation of electrodermal responses in terms of an explanation suggested by Kilpatrick (1971) and, more recently, by Schwartz (1974). They have suggested that skin conductance level may be more responsive to cognitive and vigilance tasks, or what Schwartz refers to as “cortical arousability.” Spontaneous electrodermal fluctuations, on the other hand, may be more expressive of emotional or limbic system stress, referred to by Schwartz as “subcortical reactivity.” Although Schwartz indicates that this is an oversimplified explanation, we viewed it as consistent with the data from our study. Subjects in the escapable condition, who would be expected to have greater vigilance and task involvement during the experimental task than subjects in the inescapable condition because of the probability of escaping, had higher skin conductance levels. At the same time, these subjects had a smaller number of spontaneous electrodermal fluctuations than the subjects who could not escape. This would be expected due to the greater emotional stress in the inescapable-condition subjects prompted by their inability to escape the noise. Indeed, it has also been shown by Hokanson, DeGood, Forrest, and Brittain (1971) that the lack of any control over a stressful task (performance of a symbol-matching task with shocks being delivered for poor performance) produced significantly greater increases in blood pressure than a condition in which subjects could personally control the time course of this experimental task. Blood pressure is a common physiological correlate of increased arousal.

Along with the foregoing physiological evidence of emotional stress in the learned helplessness subjects, we have also found an increase in self-reported affect in subjects exposed to the learned helplessness task. In studies both by Gatchel, McKinney, and Koebernick (1977b) and by Gatchel, Paulus, and Maples (1975), it was found that there was an increase in depression, anxiety, and hostility—as measured by the Multiple Affect Adjective Check List (Zuckerman & Lubin, 1965)—in subjects exposed to a learned helplessness task. Similar results have also been reported by Miller and Seligman (1975).

THE EFFECTS OF PERCEIVED CONTROL IN “REAL-LIFE” SITUATIONS

Thus, the negative emotional impact of an aversive event appears to be a function of the degree to which a subject can control it. Personal control appears to decrease significantly the negative emotional impact of a stressor. In “real-life” situations, there have been some recent studies to suggest the importance of perceived control over a stressful situation in reducing the aversive emotional impact of that situation. Langer, Janis, and Wolfer(1975) reported a study in which it was found that when the perception of control over stress was induced in hospital patients by a method that emphasized to these patients their ability to exert cognitive control over the situation, these subjects required fewer pain-relief drugs and sedatives and were also viewed by nurses as evidencing less anxiety.

In another study, Langer and Rodin (1976) demonstrated that enhanced personal responsibility and choices given to a group of nursing home residents resulted in a marked improvement, relative to a comparison group, in factors such as general alertness, active participation, and a general sense of well-being. Many residents in nursing homes experience an adverse reaction to this institutionalization, probably due to their inability to manipulate and control their environment, which results in feelings of helplessness and the development of physical symptoms (Schulz & Aderman, 1973). Providing these residents with some sense of control apparently will alleviate some of these negative reactions and lead to a better adjustment. Schulz (1976) has also found that the introduction of predictable and controllable positive events produces a significant therapeutic impact on the well-being of institutionalized aged.

Another area of growing interest in which perceived control appears to play an important role is research on crowding. Rodin (1976) has suggested that one result of chronic crowded living is the development of a feeling that one is at the mercy of one's environment. Because high-density living appears to decrease an individual's opportunity to exert control over that environment, it is assumed that feelings of perceived uncontrollability are developed under such conditions. Individuals come to perceive that they cannot control the contingency between their responses and outcomes. This perception, according to Rodin (1976), appears to affect significantly the performance of those persons on a variety of tasks.

In a recent study, Langer and Saegert (1977) examined the aversive effects produced by a high-density condition in a naturalistic situation—shopping at a crowded supermarket. It was found that the aversiveness of this crowded condition could be significantly ameliorated by information that gave individuals cognitive control of the situation, in the form of data about the expected effects of crowding before exposure to it. There was an increase in complex task performance and better emotional responding produced by this cognitive control condition. It thus appears that perceived control may play a significant role in a very prevalent environmental condition—crowding. It should be pointed out, though, that this viewpoint is still very speculative and requires a great deal of additional research.

THE EFFECTS OF NONVERIDICAL PERCEIVED CONTROL

In the majority of studies that demonstrated that the emotional impact of an aversive event appears to be a function of the degree to which a subject can control it, the stress-inducing effects were produced by the experimenter's arrangement of experimental events, with little attention being paid to the subject's belief or perception of control. There have been, however, some studies that specifically examined whether these stress-reducing effects are produced by merely creating the belief in subjects that they can control the amount of stress, even though they actually cannot. The first widely cited study that experimentally manipulated the perception of effective control over a stressor where there actually was none was conducted by Geer, Davison, and Gatchel (1970). There were two parts to the experiment. In the first part, all subjects were instructed to press a microswitch at the onset of a 6-second, painful electric shock, so that their reaction time could be measured. Following 10 such trials, half the subjects (perceived-control group) were told that by decreasing their reaction times during the second part of the experiment, which would also consist of 10 trials, they could reduce shock duration in half. These subjects were thus led to believe that they could actually exert control during the next 10 trials. The remaining subjects (no-perceived-control group) were simply told that the shock would be of shorter duration during the next 10 trials. All subjects, however, regardless of group assignment or reaction-time speed, received 3-second shocks on all 10 trials during this second part of the experiment. Thus, the actual amount of aversive stimulation was held constant across ...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• PREFACE
• 1. PERCEIVED CONTROL: A REVIEW AND EVALUATION OF THERAPEUTIC IMPLICATIONS
• 2. A MODEL OF LIFE CRISIS, CONTROL, AND HEALTH OUTCOMES: CARDIAC REHABILITATION AND RELOCATION OF THE ELDERLY
• 3. ENVIRONMENTAL STRESS AND THE TYPE A RESPONSE
• 4. DESTRUCTION AND PERCEIVED CONTROL
• 5. JUDGMENT OF CONTINGENCY: ERRORS AND THEIR IMPLICATIONS
• 6. INTRINSIC MOTIVATION FOR CONTROL: FACT OR FICTION
• 7. DEPRESSION MAINTENANCE AND INTERPERSONAL CONTROL
• AUTHOR INDEX
• SUBJECT INDEX