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CHAPTER 2 56 beneficial effects of exposure, and safety behavior aimed at minimizing the severity of threat (‘subtle safety behavior’) may not hinder extinction learning. Nevertheless, Experiment 2 of the current research also showed that for some participants who used subtle safety behavior extinction was prevented. There are various explanations for this. Two parsimonious explanations come from the inhibitory learning model of fear extinction (Craske et al., 2014). The inhibitory learning model posits that fear extinction involves new learning of an inhibitory association between the CS and the US (Bouton 2002, 2004, 2016). A first potential explanation is that the availability of the subtle safety behavior functioned as a negative occasion setter (Bouton, 2016) and prevented inhibitory learning, despite the changes we had made to the experimental task in Experiment 2 to prevent this. In Experiment 2, participants may have perceived the instruction screen that preceded the CS on full avoidance and subtle safety behavior trials or taking off the headphones itself as a cue that inhibited the CS – US association. This would have prevented participants from learning the inhibitory CS – US association. A second potential explanation is that participants who did not show extinction in the Test phase may have perceived different contexts in the experimental task, which caused contextual renewal of threat expectancy for C in the Test phase. According to the inhibitory learning model, the individuals learned two associations: an excitatory association (CS – US) and an inhibitory association (CS – no US; Craske et al., 2014). Extinction learning is context-dependent (Bouton, 2004), which means that the inhibitory association is dominant in the context in which extinction learning occurred. A change in the external context or in a person’s internal state after extinction can cause a return of fear for the CS (contextual renewal; Bouton, 2002, 2004, 2016; Vervliet, Craske, & Hermans, 2013). Extinction learning occurred in the ‘headphones off’ context for participants in the Subtle safety behavior condition, whereas threat expectancy in the Test phase was assessed in the ‘headphones on’ context. The Test phase context, which was similar to the acquisition context, was