This study investigated outcome-selective Pavlovian-to-instrumental transfer (PIT) in fight-or-flight decision making. Participants learned to attack or retreat from monsters (instrumental phase) and to associate environments with specific monsters without responding (Pavlovian phase). In the transfer phase, they chose responses to unseen monsters…

Pavlovian fear conditioning is a widely used behavioral paradigm for studying associative learning in rodents. Despite early recognition that subjects may engage in a variety of both conditioned and unconditioned responses, the last several decades have seen the field narrow its focus to measure freezing as the sole indicator of conditioned fear.…

In obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), functional behaviors such as checking that a door is locked become dysfunctional, maladaptive, and debilitating. However, it is currently unknown how aversive and appetitive motivations interact to produce functional and dysfunctional behavior in OCD. Here we show a double dissociation in the effects of…

A fundamental property of extinction is that the behavior that is suppressed during extinction can be unmasked through a number of postextinction procedures. Of the commonly studied unmasking procedures (spontaneous recovery, reinstatement, contextual renewal, and rapid reacquisition), rapid reacquisition is the only approach that allows a direct…

Sign- and goal-tracking are differentially associated with drug abuse-related behavior. Recently, it has been hypothesized that sign- and goal-tracking behavior are mediated by different neurobehavioral valuation systems, including differential incentive salience attribution. Herein, we used different conditioned stimuli to preferentially elicit…

Conditioned defeat is a model wherein hamsters that have previously experienced a single social defeat subsequently exhibit heightened levels of avoidance and submission in response to a smaller, non-aggressive intruder. While we have previously demonstrated the critical involvement of the basolateral and central nuclei of the amygdala in the…

Lesions of the basolateral amygdala (BLA) have long been associated with abnormalities of taste-related behaviors and with failure in a variety of taste- and odor-related learning paradigms, including taste-potentiated odor aversion, conditioned taste preference, and conditioned taste aversion. Still, the general role of the amygdala in…

Process and outcome of a smoking cessation program using behavior therapy along (BT) or behavior therapy plus the nicotine patch (BTP) was studied in 64 participants. Abstinence was significantly higher for the BTP group from the end of behavioral treatment (79% vs. 63%) through the three-month follow-up, with the effects weakening at the six- and…

General strain theory (GST) was tested as an explanation of violent and status offense delinquency of South Korean girls and boys. One research objective was to determine whether Korean girls and boys differed in their experience of each type of strain and in the levels of conditioning effects that might moderate the connections of strain to…

Acting on the premise that she was teaching her son a task, each of 30 mothers selected consequences for her child's errors. In actuality, feedback to the mother regarding her son's performance was experimentally manipulated. Results showed that differential conditioning of both high and low maternal punitiveness could be achieved by using the…

To determine the influence of successful or unsuccessful competitive outcomes and small or large margins of victory/defeat on performance, pairs of female undergraduate students "competed" against each other in a dart tossing contest. False feedback about the outcomes and margin of victory/defeat led subjects to believe they were winning every…

The influence of aversive conditions on interpersonal attraction was investigated using 60 female undergraduates as subjects. Dyads were formed and equally divided into aversive (loud-noise) and neutral (low-noise) conditions. After completing an attitude survey questionnaire subjects completed a short filler task while the experimenter…

Contrasted characteristics of antisocial adolescents who desist from crime in adulthood with characteristics of those who became adult criminals. Proposed that psychophysiological differences between the two groups could reveal procedures to protect vulnerable individuals against crime. Findings suggest that better conditioning and enhanced…

Five experiments were conducted to determine whether properties inherent in some training procedures may subtly influence the adaptability of skilled performance of complex tasks. The first two experiments assessed the insensitivity of low-rate performances. Examined in the third experiment was the issue of whether instructions that focus…