Instances of basic conditioning actually involve both instrumental and classical contingencies. Th at is to say there is always a relationship between the individu- al’s behavior and its consequences (instrumental relationship) and there is a rela- tionship between the context (the setting, discriminative cues for the reward) and the consequences (classical relationship). Th ere is one heavily researched paradigm in which this dual relationship seems to be especially important, and that is the experimental procedure known as active avoidance learning.
Th is arrangement in the laboratory is one in which an aversive, painful event (such as an electric shock) is signaled by an auditory tone or a light. Th e animal can escape the shock by performing some action, typically jumping over a small barrier into a safe compartment where there is no shock. It is easy to see that the cessation of shock (and its painful eff ects) serves as a reward for the instrumen- tal actions of escape. Th is is called negative reinforcement. But after a few learn- ing trials, the animal does not wait around for the shock—as soon as it hears the warning tone it leaps to safety, thus avoiding the shock entirely. Th is pattern becomes quite persistent, and the animal will avoid the shock for trial after trial. Well and good, except for one thing. If the jumping behavior was reinforced by cessation of the shock, what is reinforcing the avoidance jumping, since no shock is now forthcoming? For all the animal “knows,” the shock has been turned off , and in fact it sometimes has, particularly if you want to extinguish the avoidance (barrier jumping) behavior.
Why in this experimental paradigm is the animal’s avoidance behavior so per- sistent? First Mowrer (1939) and then Miller (1948) suggested a simple answer. During the escape trials jumping led to cessation of shock and was thus instru- mentally rewarded (factor one), but there was a pairing of the warning tone and the shock, so that through classical conditioning fear would be conditioned to the warning signal (factor two). When the animal starts to avoid, the warning signal is turned off , thus resulting in an immediate cessation of fear. Reduction of fear is reinforcing, Miller reasoned, and that is what is maintaining the active avoidance behavior. You should be saying to yourself, why doesn’t the fear extin- guish once active avoidance is taking place? Th e answer is that because the ani- mal jumps so quickly and the warning tone is turned off so fast, not much of an extinction trial is really being off ered. If the animal were to experience the tone without the shock (classical extinction) in a more prolonged situation in which avoidance was not possible, the fear should extinguish. Th en, when avoidance is again possible, the animals should fail to make the avoidance response, since
the tone now signals nothing or maybe even “no shock.” And that is exactly what happens.
Th e potential relevance to human behavioral dynamics should be obvious. Even though the shock is turned off , so to speak, we try to avoid situations that make us fearful or uncomfortable and because we avoid them we are not exposed to simple extinction trials that would show that they are not objectively danger- ous. I have put that deliberately in a sort of layperson’s common sense, cognitive interpretation because there are many objections to the details of two-factor theory and conditioning interpretations in general. But the one overarching idea, which seems so crucial to many forms of intervention, is that we do things not to avoid the objective harm that we think might result, but to avoid unpleas- ant emotional feelings. If we engage in a behavior that seems inappropriate or maladaptive, but it is one that results in the termination of pain, anxiety, fear, shame, stress, tension, or any other negative feeling, then that behavior will per- sist through negative reinforcement. We actively do things to turn off unpleas- ant experiences and to escape or avoid negative feelings, regardless of how those feelings originally came about. To change that behavior we need to change, or learn to tolerate, the unpleasant feeling.
In recent years, any deliberate strategy that allows us to minimize or avoid negative experiences, whether unpleasant thoughts or feelings, has come to be called experiential avoidance (Hayes, Strosahl, & Wilson, 1999). Th e new insight from this renaming is that people may diff er in the degree to which they can tolerate these unpleasant private experiences. We might label this “anxiety sen- sitivity” (or depression sensitivity, or guilt sensitivity, or overreactive Flight– Fright–Freeze System, FFFS). If that is so, it could explain why feelings such as anxiety or depression are so often struggled against by clients. Conceivably, therefore, the struggle is their problem, rather than the negative experience per se. Alternatively, if someone has been severely stressed—for example, by the trauma of sexual abuse or assault—the strategy used to reduce or avoid those feel- ings (we often call it coping) might be quite successful for a while but then end up resulting in further negative outcomes (Pechtel, Evans, & Podd, 2011). Common examples seen clinically of ineff ectual “coping” are strategies such as abusing drugs or alcohol, suppressing all feelings (numbing or experiential avoidance), or resisting positive, romantic sexual encounters. Individuals who are emotionally traumatized as young children experience early-onset anxiety, which contrib- utes to substance abuse, in turn stressful life events, less social support, and thus more severe symptoms of psychopathology in adulthood (Kendler, Gardner, & Prescott, 2001).
Psychotherapists accept that there must be many diff erent ways in which unpleasant feelings about situations that others fi nd neutral can come about. I personally think that classical conditioning is one of them. Yes, it may be true that most people who fear heights have never fallen off a cliff or a ladder, and people who have fallen off a ladder do not necessarily develop a conditioned fear.
But if you wanted to create a fear of heights in someone (and why you would I don’t know) then arranging for them to fall and hurt themselves seems like a sure way to achieve it. After an earthquake collapses a large portion of your house around you (UCS for terror), aftershocks that merely shake the ground (CS) elicit intense, if momentary, fear (CR). I worked with a child client who had a strong fear of traffi c and of crossing busy streets. He had been knocked down by a car outside his school and his ankle was pinned under the wheel of the car for many minutes before he could be freed. Cognitively he knew that cars were gen- erally not arbitrarily dangerous as long as he stayed on the sidewalk, but when he saw moving traffi c he panicked and froze.
Th e clinical task was to extinguish this little boy’s fear. I can think of many ways of doing this. Th e fi rst thing is to make sure—speaking analogously—that the shock has been turned off and there is no true threat. Th at is problem number one right there—cars are dangerous. Th e shock is not off , it is just not likely to occur. Th e second thing is to encourage approach rather than avoidance, to allow extinction to take place. In what is problem number two, encourage is the opera- tive word, since forcing him to be exposed to moving traffi c is likely to produce intense avoidance reactions. We also want approach to be more rewarding than avoidance, which is problem number three: before the fear is extinguished, the negative reinforcement of avoidance by fear reduction (experiential avoidance) continues to be quite powerful. Finally, problem number four, if exposure to traf- fi c could be arranged, we do not want the fear response to be so intense that some sort of “incubation” process is going to occur. Parents know this only too well. Th ey push the child to confront something he or she is afraid of; however, the fear reaction is so strong that the parents panic and remove the child from the situation, thus resulting in escape behavior being reinforced (by fear reduc- tion). Th e fear is now even stronger.
Telling children that dogs are not dangerous and that there are no monsters under their bed is a fi ne thing to do—reassurance never hurts—but it will gener- ally not extinguish severe anxiety. To achieve this, new learning, based on actual experience, is required. Meaningful therapy is about new learning, and learning comes from doing, from experiences. People feel anxious when they perceive a threat (both physical and psychological). If the threat is realistic then the anxi- ety is highly adaptive and will motivate caution in the form of avoidance or look- ing for ways of staying safe. When you tell your child that playing with matches is dangerous (verbal conditioning) you do not expect or want them to become phobic about lighting a match. You want them to do so in a safe way—exercise caution. If the threat is unrealistic, however, we might expect the anxiety to be reduced over time. But with people experiencing intense anxiety, like a panic attack, there is a realistic threat—paradoxically it is that they will panic or feel intense anxiety and perhaps lose control and be publicly embarrassed. Situations (stimuli) that cause anxiety or distress in general are aversive because they cause anxiety and distress. Worrying about worry, thinking it is uncontrollable, and
being concerned about its consequences for mental and physical health (lack of sleep or the harm of hypertension) is a phenomenon dubbed “meta-worry” by Wells (1999) and is hypothesized by cognitive theorists to be the underlying dynamic for generalized anxiety problems.
I worked once with an airline pilot who had become extremely fearful of fl ying (I will not mention the airline he worked for). He was not anxious about crash- ing or causing harm to himself or his passengers, essentially because he did not foresee that as very likely. What he was terrifi ed of was that in an emergency, even one he had been trained to handle easily, he would have an anxiety attack and lose control so that the co-pilot would have to take over the plane. Any little warning signal in the cockpit triggered anxiety, which triggered more intense anxiety, mediated by thoughts of loss of control. You can call this incubation, or fear of fear, but the dynamics are that the threat is real, not imagined, and very easily remembered. You cannot change the valence of the situation by arguing. Th e client knows objectively that it is not dangerous, but that does not make it less threatening psychologically.