Aversive Conditioning and Learning

Aversive Conditioning and Learning covers the significant advances in establishing the phenomena, principles, and other aspects of aversive conditioning and learning. This book is organized into three sections encompassing nine chapters. The first section deals with operant and classical conditioning of responses of the autonomic nervous system and with behavioral measurement of conditioned fear. The next section discusses the mechanism of avoidance learning and a number of problem areas, including the effects of response selection on the ease of acquisition and the nature and slow time course of the processes that reinforce avoidance learning. Other problems explore are the influence on avoidance learning of prior experience with uncontrollable shock and with reliable and unreliable predictors of shock, an analysis of avoidance learning in terms of a Markov model of short- and long-term memory, and the nature of retention of conditioned fear and the possible hormonal mechanisms that control performance motivated by fear. The last section examines some of the unexpected effects of punishment, which usually produces suppression of behavior. This section emphasizes the effects of noncontingent aversive stimuli that may account for the suppressive effects of punishment and on the paradoxical facilitation of behavior that sometimes results from response-contingent shock. This book will prove useful to medical psychologists, psychiatrists, and workers in the related fields.