Avoiding at all costs? Higher approach incentives disrupt protection-from-extinction

DOI

Approach-avoidance tendencies play a major role in the development and maintenance of anxiety disorders as repeated avoidance behaviours are assumed to prevent fear extinction. Avoidance decisions and their effect on fear extinction were investigated in two separate studies with varying avoidance costs. In both studies, a Virtual Reality fear conditioning procedure with ecologically relevant avoidance costs (temporal delay and physical effort) was employed. Participants had to choose between a safe stimulus (low reward, no unconditioned stimulus (US)) and a risky stimulus (high reward, 75% chance of encountering the US). After differential fear acquisition and learning to prevent the US using a virtual avoidance button (avoidance learning), participants were randomized to an Avoidance condition or No Avoidance condition during fear extinction. Results showed high (Study 1), but not low (Study 2), avoidance costs resulted in less avoidance behaviour. Even though there were no between-group differences, comparing avoiders and non-avoiders in both studies demonstrated that avoidance behaviours protected acquired fear from extinction, resulting in the maintenance of US-expectancies and a sustained preference for the safe stimulus. These results provide insight in how avoidance behaviours maintain fear responses and how treatment might be improved by focusing on the costs of avoidance behaviours.

Identifier
DOI https://doi.org/10.34894/WLEA4O
Related Identifier https://doi.org/10.1016/j.lmot.2021.101710
Metadata Access https://dataverse.nl/oai?verb=GetRecord&metadataPrefix=oai_datacite&identifier=doi:10.34894/WLEA4O
Provenance
Creator Lemmens, Anke ORCID logo; Smeets, Tom ORCID logo; Beckers, Tom ORCID logo; Dibbets, Pauline ORCID logo
Publisher DataverseNL
Contributor Lemmens, Anke; faculty data manager FPN
Publication Year 2021
Rights info:eu-repo/semantics/restrictedAccess
OpenAccess false
Contact Lemmens, Anke (Maastricht University); faculty data manager FPN (Maastricht University)
Representation
Resource Type experimental data; Dataset
Format application/x-spss-sav; application/vnd.openxmlformats-officedocument.spreadsheetml.sheet
Size 81407; 93950; 93360
Version 1.0
Discipline Agriculture, Forestry, Horticulture, Aquaculture; Agriculture, Forestry, Horticulture, Aquaculture and Veterinary Medicine; Life Sciences; Social Sciences; Social and Behavioural Sciences; Soil Sciences