Conditioned suppression under positive, negative, and no contingency between conditioned and unconditioned stimuli.

The team worked with lab animals to test three stimulus set-ups.

In one set, a tone always came right before food. In the second, the tone meant no food would come. In the third, food came no matter what.

They watched how each set-up changed the animals’ lever pressing during and after the tone.

When the tone predicted food, pressing paused during the tone then sped up right after.

When the tone predicted no food, pressing stayed low the whole time.

With no link between tone and food, pressing barely changed at all.

Hall (1992) later ran a similar lab test and saw the same pattern: positive contingencies push response rates up, negative ones hold them down.

Montague et al. (2025) built on this idea. They showed that a once-rich positive contingency can later cause resurgence when that reward stops.

Juanico et al. (2016) moved from lab animals to preschoolers. They found that tying bigger rewards to high-preference toys also boosts self-control, echoing the power of a strong reward link.

The direction of your reinforcement contingency matters as much as the reward itself. If you want brief pauses followed by energetic work, pair a signal with sure payoff. If you want steady low behavior, pair the signal with payoff absence. Check your signals—clients quickly read which ones mean “go” and which mean “stop.”