The influence of extinction and counterconditioning procedures on operant evaluative conditioning and intersecting regularity effects

Abstract

One of the most effective methods of influencing what people like and dislike is to expose them to systematic patterns (or ‘regularities’) in the environment, such as the repeated presentation of a single stimulus (mere exposure), two or more stimuli (evaluative conditioning (EC)) or to relationships between stimuli and behaviour (approach/avoidance). Hughes et al . (2016) J. Exp. Psychol. Gen. 145 , 731–754. ( doi:10.1037/xge0000100 ) found that evaluations also emerge when regularities in the environment intersect with one another. In this paper, we examined if evaluations established via operant EC and intersecting regularities can be undermined via extinction or revised via counterconditioning. Across seven pre-registered studies ( n = 1071), participants first completed a learning phase designed to establish novel evaluations followed by one of multiple forms of extinction or counterconditioning procedures designed to undo them. Results indicate that evaluations were— in general —resistant to extinction and counterconditioning. Theoretical and practical implications along with future directions are discussed.

Online counterconditioning with COVID-19-relevant stimuli in lockdown: Impact on threat expectancy, fear, and persistent avoidance

“…Both forms of counterconditioning however were effective at reducing negative evaluative responses when tested in a separate affective priming task (cf. Hughes et al, 2020 ). Keller and Dunsmoor (2020) found that more CS category exemplars were remembered following counterconditioning than extinction and that CC reduced the renewal of conditioned fear, while other studies have produced mixed results of similar aversive-to-appetitive counterconditioning methods on the renewal of fear ( Kang et al, 2018 ; Meulders et al, 2015 ; van Dis et al, 2019 ).…”