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2 DO SAFETY BEHAVIORS PRESERVE THREAT BELIEFS? 35 pressing a button on a response box that effectively cancelled the shock. During a subsequent extinction phase, stimulus C was no longer followed by shock. Participants in the experimental condition, but not those in the control condition, were given the opportunity to use safety behavior during C trials. All participants in the experimental condition used safety behavior on all C trials. In a following test phase, in which safety behavior was no longer available for any stimulus, threat expectancy and skin conductance responses for C remained high in the experimental condition, whereas they had decreased in the control condition (Lovibond et al., 2009). Presumably, participants in the experimental condition misattributed the nonoccurrence of the shock to the safety behavior, which prevented extinction. This suggests that safety behaviors that preclude the occurrence of threat prevent fear extinction. However, neither the study by Lovibond et al. (2009) nor the studies by Milosevic and Radomsky (2008, 2013) are direct, experimental tests of the crucial remaining issue: does safety behavior that allows the occurrence of threat prevent fear extinction? Answering this question was the aim of the present research. EXPERIMENT 1 In Experiment 1, we aimed to replicate Lovibond et al.’s (2009) finding that safety behavior that precludes the occurrence of threat prevents fear extinction in an adapted version of their fear conditioning paradigm. A first change to the paradigm was that instead of a shock, the US was an aversive loud noise presented through headphones that were connected to the computer with a sound amplifier. This allowed us to operationalize safety behaviors that did and did not prevent the occurrence of threat. The fear conditioning task started with the Pavlovian acquisition phase, during which participants learned the CS – US associations. Stimulus A and C (CS+) were followed by the loud noise, and stimulus B (CS-) was not. Next, during the Safety behavior acquisition phase, all participants learned to