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CHAPTER 2 34 effects between the incorporation or removal of safety behaviors during exposure (Meulders, Van Daele, Volders, & Vlaeyen, 2016). The crucial question is how to explain this inconsistency. This is not only theoretically, but also clinically relevant, because it has obvious consequences for the psychological treatment of anxiety disorders. Rachman, Radomsky, and Shafran (2008) argued that not all safety behaviors necessarily prevent disconfirmatory experiences, and they called for a reconsideration of the categorical rejection of safety behavior during treatment. If the negative effects of safety behavior on extinction learning indeed depend on whether safety behaviors preclude disconfirmatory experiences, then safety behaviors that allow the occurrence of threat should not hamper extinction, and may not be detrimental to the beneficial effects of exposure. Preliminary empirical support for this ‘interference with disconfirmation’ hypothesis can be derived from two studies by Milosevic and Radomsky (2008, 2013), in which participants could use protective gear, such as gloves and goggles during exposure to a snake or spider. Exposure with and without the use of these safety behaviors resulted in comparable reductions of a fear of snakes (2008) and spiders (2013). One possible explanation is that this safety behavior did not prevent the corrective learning experience of not getting attacked by the snake or spider, and therefore did not hinder fear extinction. Additional empirical support for the interference with disconfirmation hypothesis comes from a study by Lovibond, Mitchell, Minard, Brady, and Menzies (2009). In a laboratory fear conditioning experiment, safety behavior that precluded the occurrence of threat prevented the extinction of subjective threat expectancy and skin conductance responses, which are measures of fear in fear conditioning research (Boddez, Baeyens, Luyten, Vansteenwegen, & Hermans, 2013). In a Pavlovian acquisition phase, participants learned that two neutral stimuli (A and C, which both served as conditional stimuli or CS+) were followed by shock (unconditional stimulus or US), and a third neutral stimulus (B, which served as CS-) was not. Next, participants learned to use safety behavior during presentation of stimulus A by