Tasting Life

In science, as in life, the right moment is of great importance. I started studying social psychology in the mid-1970s. I was dealing with the same topics as my mentors. For example, while preparing my PhD, I studied perceived control and the phenomenon of learned helplessness - these topics were very popular among psychologists at that time. The concept of learned helplessness (which consists in the fact that people become helpless and passive, seeing that they have no control over the effects of their actions) was proposed as a model explaining depression. At the time, I conducted experiments with the help of which I checked the hypotheses regarding the impact of lack of control over the results on depressed and non-depressed people.