Flipbook

2 DO SAFETY BEHAVIORS PRESERVE THREAT BELIEFS? 37 a measure of associative learning in fear conditioning research (e.g., Visser, Scholte, Beemsterboer, & Kindt, 2013). Hence, instead of skin conductance responses, we included pupil dilation responses as a psychophysiological measure of fear learning in Experiment 1. We had intended to include a third condition in Experiment 1, in which participants could use subtle safety behavior during the Extinction phase: the Subtle safety behavior condition. However, we tested several participants in this condition, and they reported different interpretations of the procedure and uncertainty about the experimental task at the debriefing. The cause of these differences was unclear. We therefore did not include this condition in Experiment 1, and first investigated whether we could replicate the findings by Lovibond et al. (2009) in the current paradigm. Note that, in Experiment 1, subtle safety behavior was available for all participants during the Safety behavior acquisition phase, but none of the participants could use this response during the Extinction phase. In Experiment 1, we investigated the effect of full avoidance versus no avoidance or safety behavior on the extinction of threat expectancy ratings, and on a psychophysiological measure of fear learning (cf. Lovibond et al., 2009). We hypothesized that making the full avoidance response during unreinforced CS presentations would prevent extinction. In line with the findings by Lovibond et al. (2009), we hypothesized that threat expectancy and pupil dilation responses for stimulus C in the Test phase that followed the Extinction phase would be higher, and larger, in the Full avoidance condition than in the Control condition.