Although rats emit different odors in a goalbox upon receipt of unsignaled reward and nonreward, recent studies have failed to find odor differences from unsignaled large and small reward, apparently disconfirming the generalization that frustration-producing manipulations lead to a distinctive emission. Experiment 1 tested the hypothesis that providing discriminative runway signals, permitting subjects to anticipate the large and small rewards, would lead to different odor emissions. Results supported the hypothesis: donor rats emitted odors sufficiently different to provide cues for differential responding in test subjects. However, an attempt to replicate the recent observations on unsignaled rewards suggested that these, too, occasioned goalbox emissions. Therefore, Experiment 2 again gave donors unsignaled large and small reward, but increased the incentive for discrimination in test rats. Test subjects readily discriminated, confirming the conclusion that large and small rewards occasion different emissions even without discriminative signals and supporting a frustration-odor interpretation.Although many studies have found that laboratory rats excrete different odors upon receipt of unsignaled reward and nonreward on a partial reinforcement schedule (e.g.,
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