Rats prefer signaled over unsignaled shock-free periods.

Abstract

for their assistance in data collection; B. J. Winer for his advice concerning the statistical analyses; Michael S. Fanselow for his cooperation and suggestions; and Pietro Badia and Kenneth Bordens for their valuable comments on an earlier draft of this article.Requests for reprints should be sent to Bruce B.

Immunization to learned helplessness in appetitive noncontingent contexts

“…Dess, Linwick, Patterson, Overmier, & Levine, 1983), the uncontrollable events being responsible for the motivational deficit and the unpredictable events being responsible for the associative deficit. The importance of predictability in this account is in accord with findings that animals prefer predictable shocks to unpredictable shocks (Abbott, 1985;Badia, Harsh, & Abbott, 1979), and that the stress reaction to shocks is often attenuated when the shocks are predictable (Abbott, Schoen, & Badia, 1984;Dess et aI., 1983).…”

Stimuli Inevitably Generated by Behavior That Avoids Electric Shock Are Inherently Reinforcing

“…For example, Badia, Harsh, and Abbott (1979) have summarized an extensive series of experiments in which rats were allowed to switch from an unsignaled condition to a condition in which shocks were preceded by signals and shock-free periods were preceded by the absence of those signals. The compound stimulation of the signaled condition combined with the absence of a warning signal served as a safety signal, and the safety signal reinforced the choice of the signaled condition (see Abbott, 1985, for the clearest discussion). Moreover, I have already referred to the many experiments published before the shock-frequency theory was formulated in which innocuous stimuli were made aversive by a pairing with shock during one series of trials and then terminated by responding during a second, temporally segregated, series of trials (see McAllister et al, 1980, for citations).…”

Intolerance of Uncertainty Mediates the Relationship between Panic and the Startle Reflex in Anticipation of Unpredictable Threat

“…For example, Mineka and Kihlstrom (1978) authored a seminal article highlighting the importance of unpredictability and uncontrollability in eliciting affective, cognitive, and somatic disturbances across the experimental neurosis literature (also see Mineka & Zinbarg, 2006). Indeed, this perspective has been well-supported by research indicating that organisms tend to prefer predictable over unpredictable threat (Abbott, 1985;Fanselow, 1980;Lejuez, Eifert, Zvolensky, & Richards, 2000), and the latter elicits greater self-reported anxiety (Grillon, Baas, Lissek, Smith, & Milstein, 2004;Shankman, Robison-Andrew, Nelson, Altman, & Campbell, 2011), physiological responding (Geer & Maisel, 1972;Seligman, 1968;Weiss, 1970), and avoidance behaviors (Frankel & Saal, 1976;Lockard, 1965). Later, several authors expounded on the role of unpredictability in relation to particular anxiety disorders, such as the unpredictable and uncontrollable nature of trauma and stress in posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD;Foa et al, 1992), intolerance of ambiguity and uncertainty eliciting chronic worry in generalized anxiety disorder (GAD; Dugas, Gagnon, Ladouceur, & Freeston, 1998), and the unpredictability of panic attacks contributing to the development of panic disorder (PD; Bouton, Mineka, & Barlow, 2001).…”