Flipbook

2 DO SAFETY BEHAVIORS PRESERVE THREAT BELIEFS? 47 occurs in a time window immediately preceding the US (Visser, Kunze, Westhoff, Scholte, & Kindt, 2015). However, the US did not coincide with CS+ offset in the current paradigm, because participants rated threat expectancy for 5 s between CS offset and US onset. Simultaneously measuring pupil dilations during this time window may cause the pupillary responses to be affected by arousal associated with filling out the VAS (Sirois, & Brisson, 2014). Additionally, the availability or use of the full avoidance response and subtle safety behavior increased pupil dilation responses. Together, this indicates that pupil dilation responses were not a suitable psychophysiological measure of fear learning in the current paradigm. Pupil dilations were therefore not measured in Experiment 2. In Experiment 1, we did not investigate whether subtle safety behavior that minimizes threat severity prevents extinction learning. Participants in the Subtle safety behavior differed in their interpretation of the experimental task, and reported uncertainty about the task at the debriefing. This may be due to the several limitations of Experiment 1. First, in Experiment 1 the instructions in the Subtle safety behavior condition may not have been entirely clear to participants. Second, although all participants in Experiment 1 correctly described the consequences of the full avoidance responses and subtle safety behavior after the experimental task, they may not have understood these consequences correctly at the beginning of the experimental task. Third, the availability of the full avoidance response and subtle safety behavior may have functioned as negative occasion setters. An occasion setter is a cue that provides information about whether or not a CS will be followed by a US. A negative occasion setter inhibits the association between a CS and US (Bouton, 2016). At the debriefing, several participants in the Subtle safety behavior condition reported that they had reasoned that C was not followed by the loud noise as long as it was combined with the availability of the subtle safety behavior response. Hence, the picture of the green headphones may have functioned as a negative occasion setter.