There are sex differences in anxiety disorders with regard to occurrence and severity of episodes such that females tend to experience more frequent and more severe episodes. Contextual fear learning and generalization are especially relevant to anxiety disorders, which are often defined by expressing fear and/or anxiety in safe contexts. In…

Research has demonstrated the positive effects on reading achievement measures when content is conditioned as a reinforcer for prolonged reading. While previous research has focused on conditioning narrative texts on the relation to increased comprehension, there is no current research on the effects of conditioning informational texts. Experiment…

Parents play a significant role in the educational development of their children. However, there is little research around utilizing parents to collect data on their children's language skills. In particular, children with autism oftentimes demonstrate delays in the acquisition and use of language. Having information on a child's language…

Eyeblink conditioning is used in many species to study motor learning and make inferences about cerebellar function. However, the discrepancies in performance between humans and other species combined with evidence that volition and awareness can modulate learning suggest that eyeblink conditioning is not merely a passive form of learning that…

Our preferences and evaluations are often affected by contextual factors. One unavoidable context is language. We used an evaluative conditioning (EC) paradigm (pairing neutral stimuli with emotional or neutral stimuli) to investigate whether our evaluations are equally conditioned in a first (L1) and a second language (L2). An EC effect was…

Informed by the sociological concept of gaslighting, racelighting is an act of psychological manipulation whereby people of color receive messages that make them second-guess themselves and their lived experiences with race and racism. The purpose of this article is to propose racelighting as a theoretical construct to enhance understanding of the…

It has been reported that during chemotherapy treatment, some patients can experience nausea before pharmacological administration, suggesting that contextual stimuli are associated with the nauseating effects. There are attempts to reproduce with animal models the conditions under which this phenomenon is observed to provide a useful paradigm for…

Strong evidence supports a role for protein degradation in fear memory formation. However, these data have been largely done in only male animals. Here, we found that following contextual fear conditioning, females, but not males, had increased levels of proteasome activity and K48 polyubiquitin protein targeting in the dorsal hippocampus, the…

Fear is an adaptive emotion that serves to protect an organism against potential dangers. It is often studied using classical conditioning paradigms where a conditioned stimulus is paired with an aversive unconditioned stimulus to induce a threat response. Less commonly studied is a phenomenon that is related to this form of conditioning, known as…

Evaluative conditioning (EC) refers to a change in liking of a conditioned stimulus (CS) consecutive to its repeated pairing with a valent unconditioned stimulus (US). We relied on a multinomial processing tree model to compare the processes underlying EC in middle-aged children (n = 57, M[subscript age] = 8.65, range = 6.94-11.03; 31 females) and…

Tact is the most important verbal operant (Skinner, 1957) due to the uniqueness of stimulus control and its role in facilitating acquisition of another verbal (e.g., mands, intraverbals) and nonverbal (i.e., listener) operants (Sundberg, 2015). Teaching tacts to children with ASD and the research on this area, however, are largely focused on…

In signaled active avoidance (SigAA), rats learn to suppress Pavlovian freezing and emit actions to remove threats and prevent footshocks. SigAA is critical for understanding aversively motivated instrumental behavior and anxiety-related active coping. However, with standard protocols ~25% of rats exhibit high freezing and poor avoidance. This has…

Abrupt discontinuation of functional communication training can cause resurgence of challenging behavior. Teaching multiple alternative responses in sequence ("serial training") may reduce resurgence, relative to teaching a single alternative. However, previous evaluations of serial training included a different number of response…

This study examined the effects of presession attention on the acquisition of tacts (Experiment 1) and intraverbals (Experiment 2) in children diagnosed with autism. Each participant experienced 3 conditions. In the first 2 conditions, participants experienced a 15-min interval of either presession attention (PA) or no presession attention (NPA)…

While interest in active avoidance has recently been resurgent, many concerns relating to the nature of this form of learning remain unresolved. By separating stimulus and response acquisition, aversive Pavlovian-instrumental transfer can be used to measure the effect of avoidance learning on threat processing with more control than typical…