Responding Maintained Under Intermittent Schedules of Electric‐shock Presentation: “Safety” or Schedule Effcts?

Abstract

Four experiments were conducted in which lever pressing by squirrel monkeys was maintained under multiple, mixed, or chained schedules of electric-shock presentation. In the first two experiments, a multiple schedule was employed in which a fixed-interval schedule of shock presentation alternated with a signaled two-minute component. Initially, no events were scheduled during the two-minute component (a safety period). In the first experiment, the safety period was "degraded" by introducing and systematically increasing the frequency of periodic shocks presented during that component. In the second experiment, the proportion of overall safe time to unsafe time was decreased by decreasing the value of the fixed-interval schedule while holding constant shock frequency during the two-minute component. In the third experiment, the overall arrangement was changed from a multiple to a mixed schedule in an attempt to determine whether fixed-interval responding would be maintained when a single exteroceptive stimulus was associated with both components.In the fourth experiment, the overall arrangenment was changed from a multiple to a chained schedule in an effort to determine whether fixed-interval responding would be maintained when its consequence was presentation of a signaled "unsafe" period. Fixedinterval responding was well maintained under all experimental conditions; the varied relationships obtained lend more support to conceptualizations of shock-maintained behas ior as exemplifying schedule-controlled behavior than to suggestions that such behavior may be readily accounted for by "safety theory."

Effects of Ratio Contingencies on Responding Maintained by Schedules of Electric‐shock Presentation (Response‐produced Shock)

“…Branch, 1979) and others (cf. Kelleher & Morse, 1968;Malagodi, Gardner, Ward, & Magyar, 1981;McKearney, 1968) suggest that lever pressing by squirrel monkeys can be maintained indefinitely under fixed-interval schedules of shock presentation, it seemed likely that failures to maintain lever pressing in our first experiment were due in some way to the ratio contingencies we had added. Further, since it has been demonstrated clearly that responding controlled by fixed-ratio schedules can have discriminative properties (Branch, 1974;Hobson, 1975;Pliskoff & Goldiamond, 1966;Rilling & McDiarmid, 1965), it is possible that the addition of fixed-ratio contingencies might eventually have made impending shock delivery more discriminable.…”

Units of Analysis and Kinetic Structure of Behavioral Repertoires

“…Furthermore, these shockmaintained performances did not extinguish over time. Shock-maintained performances have been widely replicated and constitute a robust set of phenomena (see Branch & Dworkin, 1981;Hutchinson & Emley, 1977;Malagodi, Gardner, Ward, & Magyar, 1981;Morse & Kelleher, 1966). These findings suggest adjunctive behavior belongs to a broader class of evoked emergent behavior, which is produced by indirect schedule variables.…”

Pain and suicidality: Insights from reward and addiction neuroscience

“…The valence-based approach/avoidance dichotomy does not seem to be universal, however, as some painful (Nixon et al, 2008) and/or aversive (Sapolsky, 1998; Selye, 1976) stimuli may be perceived as desirable (i.e., rewarding and reinforcing) across various species (Goeders, 2002) as corroborated by: (a) stress-induced place preference (Shen et al, 2011) and intracranial self-stimulation of the brain regions triggering aversive experiences (Cazala et al, 1985) in rodents; (b) self-administration of mild electric shocks in non-human primates (Barrett and Spealman, 1978; Malagodi et al, 1981); (c) a variety of stress-seeking behaviors in humans, e.g., roller coasters, automobile racing, skydiving and horror movies and (d) ‘traumatic bonding’ also known as Stockholm Syndrome or sympathy developed by victims toward the individuals causing their emotional and physical pain (Cantor and Price, 2007). …”