Two experiments with human participants are presented that differentiate renewal from other behavioral effects that can produce a response after extinction. Participants played a video game and learned to suppress their behavior when sensor stimuli predicted an attack. Contexts (A, B, & C) were provided by fictitious galaxies where the game play took place. In Experiment 1, participants who received conditioning in A, extinction in B, and testing in A showed some context specificity of conditioning during extinction and a recovery of suppression on test. Experiment 2 demonstrated recovery of extinguished responding when participants were conditioned in A, extinguished in B, and tested in C, a third, neutral context. The experiment also demonstrated that the context of extinction did not control performance by becoming inhibitory. Results are discussed in terms of mechanisms that can produce a response recovery after extinction. The experiments demonstrated a renewal effect: a response recovery that was not attributable to the contexts acting as simple conditioned stimuli and is the first work with human participants to conclusively do so.

Previous research suggests that changing the context after instrumental (operant) conditioning can weaken the strength of the operant response. That result contrasts with the results of studies of Pavlovian conditioning, where a context switch often does not affect the response elicited by a conditioned stimulus. To begin to make the methods more similar, Experiments 1–3 tested the effects of a context switch in rats on a discriminated operant response (R, lever pressing or chain pulling) that had been reinforced only in the presence of a 30-s discriminative stimulus (S, tone or light). As in Pavlovian conditioning, responses and reinforcers became confined to presentations of the S during training. However, in Experiment 1, after training in Context A, a switch to Context B caused a decrement in responding during S. In Experiment 2, a switch to Context B likewise decreased responding in S when Context B was equally familiar, equally associated with reinforcement, or equally associated with the training of a discriminated operant (a different R reinforced in a different S). However, there was no decrement if Context B had been associated with the same response that was trained in Context A (Experiments 2 and 3). The effectiveness of S transferred across contexts, whereas the strength of the response did not. Experiment 4 found that a continuously reinforced response was also disrupted by context change when the same response manipulandum was used in both training and testing. Overall, the results suggest that the context can have a robust general role in the control of operant behavior. Mechanisms of contextual control are discussed.

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Contexts are sometimes informative about relationships that occur within them and sometimes not. The goal of this experiment was to determine the effect of that information value on the context-specificity of learning. Participants performed an instrumental task within a computer game in which they defended different Andalucía beaches (contexts) by destroying several attackers (planes or tanks) by clicking on them (responses) with the mouse. A colored sensor (discriminative stimulus) indicated to participants which attacker could be destroyed in a given trial - that is, which of the instrumental responses would be reinforced. Three groups of participants received training on a discrimination between two discriminative stimuli (X and Y) in Context A. The discrimination was reversed in Context B for Group I (informative). Group NI1 received the same X-Y discrimination in Context B. Group NI2 did not receive training with X and Y in Context B. Additionally, participants received training with cue Z in Context A, which consistently signaled the same outcome. A single test trial with Z revealed a lower response rate in Context B than in Context A in Group I, while no differences across contexts were found in Groups NI1 and NI2. Results suggest that when the context is informative about relationships within the experimental setting, even those relationships for which the context is not informative become context-dependent.

Introduction:The aim of the current cross-sectional study was to examine the role of socialcognitive processing in the relation between violence exposure at home and child-to-parent violence. Methods: The study included 1,624 adolescents (54.9% girls) aged between 12 and 18 years (M age = 14.7,S D= 1.7 years) from Jaén and Oviedo (Spain) who completed a set of questionnaires about violence exposure, child-to-parent violence and social-cognitive processing. Results: The data revealed that exposure to violence at home is related to dysfunctional components of social-cognitive processing, and that whereas some of these components (anger and aggressive response access) are positively related to child-to-parent violence motivated by reactive reasons, other components (anticipation of positive consequences and justification of violence) are positively related to the instrumental use of the aggression against parents. Conclusions: More prevention work is needed with children exposed to violence at home to reduce the risk of intergenerational transmission of violence. Moreover, treatment programs should include intervention on the way in which adolescents process the information in their interactions with parents. These interventions must be focused on different components of social-cognitive processing, depending on whether these aggressive behaviors are motivated by reactive or instrumental reasons.Child-to-parent violence (CPV) was initially defined several decades ago with the term "Battered Parent Syndrome", which exclusively included physical aggression and verbal/nonverbal threats of physical harm (Harbin & Madden, 1979). The concept was expanded over time and is currently defined as "any act of a child that is intended to cause physical, psychological or financial damage to gain power and control over a parent" (Cottrell, 2001, p. 3). More recently, other authors also indicate that the violent behavior is aimed to obtain power, control and domain over a parent (Molla-Esparza & Aroca-Montolío, 2018, p.17) or to dominate, coerce and control parents (Howard & Rottem, 2008, p. 10), and also that, in CPV cases, it is necessary to exclude isolated acts of violence (Molla-Esparza & Aroca-Montolío, 2018;Pereira et al., 2017) and those violent acts produced under a state of diminished consciousness (e.g., those acts caused by psychological disorders or by abstinence syndrome related to drug abuse) (Pereira et al., 2017). Following Cottrell (2001), psychological violence refers to those behaviours intended to emotionally hurt parents (e.g., intimidating, running away from home, threatening, etc.). Verbal violence is a type of psychological abuse and includes acts such as shouting, challenging, belittling, etc. Physical violence refers to acts such as pushing, spitting, kicking, punching, etc. Finally, financial abuse includes behaviours such as stealing money or parents' belongings, selling parents' possessions, destroying the home or