O conceito de incontrolabilidade na pesquisa experimental e na terapia comportamental da depressão

Abstract

Behavior Analysis offers many explanations for the phenomenon called depression, one of which refers to the model of learned helplessness. Learned helplessness is defined as a learning disability which results from exposure to uncontrollable aversive stimuli. As one of the products of this exposure, there would be the acquisition of behavioral patterns common to those observed in depressed individuals, like inactivity. Because of the parallel among the effects of the experience of uncontrollability on the behavioral repertoire in humans and nonhumans, learned helplessness has been suggested as an animal model of depression. In the literature references to the uncontrollability experience are often found in association with learned helplessness, whose occurrence is strictly linked to that condition. Uncontrollability also seems relevant to the installation of responses identified with depression. In this paper, the definitions of uncontrollability reported by publications in the field of clinical and experimental behavior psychology were described discussing the relevance of this concept in functional explanations of depression in Behavior Analysis and its possible contribution to a model of clinical depression in the light of this approach. The relationship between uncontrollability and depression is treated from five analysis categories: 1) Variability of investigated phenomena, results and definitions offered; 2) Differential effects of uncontrollability in the face of aversive and appetitive stimuli; 3) Cross-sectional approaches of the relevant variables: installers x maintainers, historical x current, exclusive x superimposed on other phenomena; 4) Uncontrollability in humans: numerous assumptions, scarce empirical evidence and verbal contingencies; 5) Treatment of depression: points of contact and distance in face of empirical investigation. The different uses of the concept of uncontrollability are distinguished, indicating how the same verbal topography issued by various authors is controlled by different events. Relevant variables to the generality of learned helplessness as the experimental model and animal equivalent of depression are discussed, justifying the need for more research into aspects such as the correspondence between the concept of uncontrollability and the experimentally established condition in the laboratory, the effects of different types of uncontrollable stimulation, the production of learned helplessness in humans and involvement of verbal processes and the different effects of pre-aversive signaling of uncontrollable stimuli. It is noted that, in general, the behavioranalytic treatment of depression consists of procedures which focus on teaching that responding controls the environment and can provide reinforcements. Also, the role of uncontrollability in the installation of depression is analyzed, concluding, ultimately, that it is a sufficient, yet not necessary condition for the occurrence and/or maintenance of the phenomenon.