Inferred threat and safety: Symbolic generalization of human avoidance learning
Highlights
► Symbolic generalization of avoidance may underlie the aetiology and maintenance of anxiety. ► We demonstrate avoidance of directly learned and indirectly related stimuli. ► Findings have implications for behavioural accounts of anxiety.
Section snippets
Participants
Twenty-one undergraduates were recruited from the student population of Swansea University and reimbursed with either £6 or partial course credit on completion of the study.
Apparatus
A computer program written in Visual Basic® 6.0 controlled all stimulus presentations and recorded all responses. Six nonsense words comprised the sample and comparison stimuli used during stimulus equivalence training and testing (i.e., JOM, CUG, VEK, BEH, PAF, ZID). Stimuli were presented in capitals, in uppercase bold
Results
During Phase 1, participants required a mean of 46.9 (SD = 42.8) training trials to meet criterion and a mean of 3.0 (SD = 2.7) cycles to pass the equivalence test.
Fig. 2 shows the percentage of trials in which participants chose to avoid learned threat and safety cues during training (Phase 2) and inferred threat and safety cues during testing (Phase 3). In general and consistent with our predictions, avoidance behaviour was high to learned and tested threat cues and low to learned and tested
Discussion
The present experiment provided evidence of the indirect control of avoidance behaviour and ratings in a laboratory model of inferred threat and safety learning. Following the emergence of two equivalence relations each consisting of three stimuli (AV1–AV2–AV3 and N1–N2–N3), threat-avoidance was trained for one member of one of the relations (AV2) and safety (non-avoidance) for another (N2). Then, inferred threat-avoidance and safety behaviour and US expectancies were tested with presentations
Acknowledgements
The authors are grateful to both the reviewers and Jan De Houwer for their helpful comments on an earlier version of this article.
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