Does the "learned" in "learned helplessness" refer specifically to behaviorism's conditioning? I was said that because the experiment of Seligman that gave birth the theory of learned helplessness was an expansion of Pavlov's experiment, hence the word &quot;learned&quot; in the term should be understood as conditioning, not learning in general. So perhaps it's better termed as &quot;conditioned helplessness&quot;?
According to Learning - Wikipedia:

Learning is the process of acquiring new understanding, knowledge, behaviors, skills, values, attitudes, and preferences.

It's clear that people with learned/conditioned helplessness acquiring new behaviors, but do they acquire new understanding, knowledge, skills, values, attitudes, and preferences?
Related:
• What is the difference between conditioning and learning?
• How does one escape learned helplessness?
• Are association, conditioning, and symbolic learning the same thing?
Wikipedia explains that there's not one theory of learned helplessness but several, some more encompassing than others with respect to what is learned:

Research has found that a human's reaction to feeling a lack of control differs both between individuals and between situations, i.e. learned helplessness sometimes remains specific to one situation but at other times generalizes across situations.[7][9][10] Such variations are not explained by the original theory of learned helplessness, and an influential view is that such variations depend on an individual's attributional or explanatory style.[11] According to this view, how someone interprets or explains adverse events affects their likelihood of acquiring learned helplessness and subsequent depression.[12] For example, people with pessimistic explanatory style tend to see negative events as permanent (&quot;it will never change&quot;), personal (&quot;it's my fault&quot;), and pervasive (&quot;I can't do anything correctly&quot;), and are likely to suffer from learned helplessness and depression.[13]

(Aside: contra to the somewhat one-sided way in which Wikipedia discusses this, the expanded theories were not that easy to demonstrate reliably, at least not with a sizeable effect.)