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Escape learning is learning an action that terminates an already-present aversive event. If making the response becomes more likely because it ends the event, the contingency is negative reinforcement. It differs from avoidance learning, in which an action prevents or postpones the event before it begins.

For example, compare a response that stops an ongoing unpleasant sound with one that prevents the sound after a warning cue. The physical response could be identical while its relation to the event differs. A yoked control can receive the same event timings without controlling them, separating exposure from controllability. Classic learned-helplessness experiments used such differences in prior controllability to study later escape performance. ^[ref] Performance also depends on sensory, motor and motivational conditions, not learning alone.

A researcher whose experiments helped establish learned helplessness. Work on escape learning compared animals with different histories of control over aversive events. The experiments made controllability, rather than exposure alone, central to interpreting later performance; extending this animal paradigm to human depression requires additional theory and evidence.^[ref]