Drug-behavior interaction history: modification of the effects of morphine on punished behavior.
A learner's past mix of reward and punishment decides whether morphine will later make punished behavior bounce back.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Scientists worked with squirrel monkeys on a food schedule. Every 30th lever press earned food. Every 30th press also got a brief electric shock.
The monkeys first lived with two kinds of sessions. One had both food and shock. The other had only food. Later, the team gave morphine and watched what happened to punished pressing.
What they found
Morphine made the monkeys press more even when shocks still came. But this only happened after they had first felt the mixed food-only and food-plus-shock sessions.
Once the drug started working, the higher pressing stayed even when morphine was stopped. The monkeys' earlier history with mixed consequences set the stage for the drug effect.
How this fits with other research
Hake et al. (1967) showed that stronger shocks suppress more, but recovery depends on past shock levels. Burgess et al. (1986) adds that drug effects on punished acts also hinge on past shock history.
Ganz et al. (2009) found ethanol reduces human punishment avoidance, matching the monkey morphine result. Both studies show drugs can lift punishment suppression, across species.
McKearney (1976) saw that d-amphetamine and pentobarbital flip punished responding based on the reinforcer. Burgess et al. (1986) extends this: even the same drug's effect depends on the animal's past schedule experience.
Why it matters
Your client's history with mixed consequences shapes how new factors, like medication, will affect their behavior. Before starting a drug, map out when the client has faced both reward and punishment for the same act. Then watch for lasting changes that stay even after the drug leaves the system.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
Squirrel monkeys were trained to respond under a multiple fixed-interval, fixed-interval schedule in which the first response after 5 min terminated a visual stimulus in the presence of which electric shocks could occur. During one component of the schedule, correlated with one color of stimulus lights, every 30th response also produced electric shock; responding was suppressed during this component to approximately 10 to 12% of that occurring in the alternate component in which responding was not punished. In contrast to previous research, morphine (0.03 to 1.0 mg/kg) increased punished responding. Unpunished responding, however, was either not affected or decreased at doses of morphine that increased punished responding. Increases in rate of punished responding also occurred when the single-schedule punishment condition was studied alone in these animals. Subsequent experimentation, which systematically analyzed the development of the rate-enhancing effects of morphine on punished responding, involved the study of drug effects in additional monkeys trained initially under a single-schedule punishment condition. The effects of morphine on punished responding were studied before, after, and then during exposure to the multiple schedule that included a component in which responding was not punished. Increases in response rate with morphine did not occur until it was administered during exposure to the multiple schedule that included a component in which responding was not punished. As with the other monkeys, once the rate increases in punished responding occurred under the multiple schedule, these effects of morphine persisted, even when the multiple schedule was removed.(ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 250 WORDS)
Journal of the experimental analysis of behavior, 1986 · doi:10.1901/jeab.1986.45-221