A potential pathway to the relapse of fear? Conditioned negative stimulus evaluation (but not physiological responding) resists instructed extinction

Abstract

Relapse of fear after successful intervention is a major problem in clinical practice. However, little is known about how it is mediated. The current study investigated the effects of instructed extinction and removal of the shock electrode on electrodermal responding (Experiment 1), fear potentiated startle (Experiment 2), and a continuous self-report measure of conditional stimulus valence (Experiments 1 and 2) in human differential fear conditioning. Instructed extinction and removal of the shock electrode resulted in the immediate reduction of differential fear potentiated startle and second interval electrodermal responding, but did not affect self-reported conditional stimulus valence. A separate sample of participants (Experiment 3) who were provided with a detailed description of the experimental scenario predicted the inverse outcome, reduced differential stimulus evaluations and continued differential physiological responding, rendering it unlikely that the current results reflect on demand characteristics. These results suggest that the negative valence acquired during fear conditioning is less sensitive to cognitive interventions than are the physiological indices of human fear learning and that valence reduction requires extended exposure training. Persisting negative valence after cognitive intervention may contribute to fear relapse after successful treatment.

Acquisition and extinction of operant pain-related avoidance behavior using a 3 degrees-of-freedom robotic arm

“…Operant conditioning differs from classical conditioning in that it concerns learning associations between responses and their outcomes, rather than associations between stimuli. 20 First, we successfully showed the acquisition of fear of movement-related pain, both in the self-reported fear and painexpectancy ratings, thus providing support for our first hypothesis. Participants in the Experimental Group picked up on the response-outcome contingencies, that is, they learned to expect the pain more when performing T1 than T2, and they expected the pain more when performing T2 than T3.…”

Bending rules: the shape of the perceptual generalisation gradient is sensitive to inference rules

“…Common examples include situations in which US occurrence is correctly believed to be modulated, but acquired (dis)liking is not (Baeyens, Crombez, De Houwer, & Eelen, 1996;Baeyens, Hendrickx, Crombez, & Hermans, 1998), and situations in which US occurrence is no longer expected due to extinction training, but conditional (dis)liking nonetheless persists (Vansteenwegen, Francken, Vervliet, De Clercq, & Eelen, 2006). A recent study also found that acquired valence (but not physiological responses including fear potentiated startle) resists instructed extinction (Luck & Lipp, 2015). The observation that results were different for the shock expectancy and valence ratings may suggest that different mechanisms are involved, with generalisation of valence conditioning being better explained by traditional association formation theories and falling out of scope of the rule learning mechanism (for a similar argument see Baeyens et al, 2009).…”

Potentiation of the startle reflex is in line with contingency reversal instructions rather than the conditioning history

“…However, in a recent study by Luck and Lipp (2015a), in which instructed extinction was combined with removal of the shock electrodes, a complete reduction of both SCRs and FPS was observed. As argued by Luck and Lipp (2015b), the incomplete reduction of FPS in the study of Sevenster et al (2012a) can perhaps be explained by a subset of participants in their experiment that did not find the extinction instructions believable (because the shock electrodes remained attached in the study of Sevenster et al, 2012a).…”