In Experiment 1, rats were fed in a compartment in which they had been shocked by being placed directly over a food dish. In Experiment 2, food was used to provide an incentive for Ss to enter the fear compartment. The results indicated that the major effect of food on fear is not one of counterconditioning, but rather one of decreasing or increasing the amount of exposure to the fear-producing situation.The procedure of feeding an organism in a fear-producing situation has been traditionally viewed as having a fear-reducing effect. The interpretation of this method of extinguishing fear, called counterconditioning, has been that fear is reduced by conditioning to the fear-producing stimuli the incompatible emotional responses associated with eating (e.g., Miller, 1951). In recent studies, however, Moltz (1954) found no effect of feeding on fear, and Lane (1954) obtained an effect that cannot clearly be attributed to counterconditioning. The present experiments were designed to evaluate further whether counterconditioning extinguishes fear.Experiment 1 had two purposes. The first was to repeat Lane's (1954) study, using a measure of the effect of counterconditioning that was less ambiguous. In Lane's study, animals were first given shock-escape training in a Miller-Mowrer apparatus, then confined in the fear compartment with shock off; during confinement, food was presented intermittently to one group but not at all to the other. The subsequent measure of running out of the fear compartment, without food or shock present, showed that the group that was fed ran out more slowly. Observations recorded during confinement indicated, however, that the no-food group crouched at the escape door while the food group 1 This article is based on a dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of PhD requirements at Yale University. The author wishes to thank the members of his committee: alternated between crouching at the door and approaching the food tray situated at the center of the compartment. This initially suggested the possibility that the difference in running-out times reflected an effect of feeding in conditioning motor responses incompatible with the measure of fear, and not an effect on the level of fear. The second purpose was to determine whether the counterconditioning effect, if one exists, results in an extinction of fear, or only a temporary suppression of it. Studies on conflict (e.g., Miller & Kraeling, 1952), in which animals are first fed and then shocked, show that the food-related responses reappear when the fear responses are extinguished. If an analogous conclusion may be drawn about counterconditioning, these findings suggest that extinguishing the association of food with the fear-producing situation would result in a reappearance of fear.
EXPERIMENT 1In this experiment, as in Lane's (1954), the sequence was: (a) fear conditioning, (b) confinement in the fear compartment with or without food, (c) measurement of residual fear. In order, however, to obtain a less ambiguous measure of fear, escape ...