Shorter communicationSafety behaviours preserve threat beliefs: Protection from extinction of human fear conditioning by an avoidance response
Section snippets
Participants
Participants were 65 undergraduate students, 42 females and 23 males, who volunteered for the experiment in partial fulfilment of a course requirement.
Apparatus
The apparatus was the same as that described in Lovibond et al. (2008), with some modifications. In brief, participants were tested individually in a darkened room. The CSs were coloured squares of blue, yellow, and green presented on a 38-cm colour computer monitor approximately 100 cm in front of the participant. The squares were approximately
Results
Four participants failed to press the response button at all during the Avoidance acquisition phase, so their data were excluded from further analysis. All remaining participants met the criterion for avoidance learning, with the majority (n = 49) responding on all 6 training trials and the remainder on 5 trials (n = 10) or 4 trials (n = 2). In the Extinction phase, all participants made the avoidance response on all 6 C trials. Four participants failed to meet the criteria for Pavlovian
Discussion
The experiment provided clear evidence for protection from extinction of a Pavlovian fear CS by an instrumental avoidance response. Participants in the Control group showed normal extinction of stimulus C, whereas participants in the Protection group, who made the avoidance response during the Extinction phase, showed little extinction. This effect adds to the evidence for protection from extinction in humans, and extends it from external stimuli to an internal (voluntary) response.
In the
Acknowledgement
This research was supported by grants A10007156 and DP0774395 from the Australian Research Council.
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