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.…

Through four previous editions, students and instructors have relied on this book's clear, concise, and highly accessible overview of the processes and mechanisms responsible for conditioning and learning. Domjan and Delamater summarize major theories of how humans and nonhuman animals learn, along with the classic experiments that support these…

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…

Contextual stimulus control over instrumental drug-seeking behavior relies on the reconsolidation of context-response-drug associative memories into long-term memory storage following retrieval-induced destabilization. According to previous studies, the basolateral amygdala (BLA) and dorsal hippocampus (DH) regulate cocaine-related memory…

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…

A sequence of behaviors consisting of appropriate responses, inappropriate responses, or a combination of both can be linked together in a behavior chain. Several operant processes may disrupt behavior chains. For example, one or more members of the behavior chain may be affected when reinforcement is withheld for the last response in the chain…

The results clearly indicate support for the general hypothesis of differential verbal conditioning effects as a function of the interaction between value related content and the S's personal value orientation. (Author)

Rats were given differential exposure to three distinct and novel foods. One of these foods was exposed for 7 days; another for 2 days, and the last was not exposed. Next, half of the rats received six daily sessions in which a compound of the three flavors was followed by opportunities to run in wheels. The other rats received the food compound…

THE SPECIFIC PROBLEM WAS WHETHER HUMANS, AFTER HAVING BEEN TRAINED ON A GIVEN REWARD SCHEDULE TO ACT IN A GIVEN WAY IN GIVEN CIRCUMSTANCES, WILL EXHIBIT FIXED EXTINCTION BEHAVIOR REGARDLESS OF THE DIFFERENCES BETWEEN THE TRAINING AND THE EXTINCTION PERIODS. SUBJECTS WERE 360 COLLEGE STUDENTS WHO HAD VOLUNTEERED FOR THE EXPERIMENT. AN APPARATUS WAS…

Study results indicated that schizophrenics who shocked themselves upon experiencing auditory hallucinations failed to show significantly greater improvement than the control group. Thus the general conclusion drawn is that conditioning did not appear to be the mechanism by which most of the significant therapeutic changes occurred. (Author)

Hypotheses that efficacy of systematic desensitization could be attributed to anxlety reduction as a result of relaxation training, to extinction of nonreinforced fear responses, or to operation of placebo factors were tested as alternatives to counterconditioning hypothesis. Test anxiety reduction was found only for subjects given relaxation…