Facilitation and suppression of human loss-avoidance by signaled, unavoidable loss.
A short warning before unavoidable loss first boosts, then cuts, avoidance in adults, and the suppression can stick.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Adults earned money by pressing a button to avoid small losses.
A red light came on 15 s before every unavoidable loss.
The researchers watched how the warning changed button pressing.
What they found
At first the red light made people press faster.
After more trials the same light made them stop pressing.
Two of three adults kept the low pressing even when losses still happened.
How this fits with other research
Ono et al. (2021) later showed that bigger warned losses push humans to avoid more, while longer timeouts push them to avoid less.
Jones et al. (1998) took the warning idea into therapy: a 30-s card plus extinction cut self-injury in children with autism.
SHETTLEWORTCHARNEY et al. (1965) found that pigeons suppressed key pecks more when shock was tied to the response than when it was unavoidable, yet the 1968 human study shows an unavoidable signal alone can still suppress behavior after repeated exposure.
Why it matters
You can use brief, clear signals to weaken avoidance habits, but timing counts. Start with a short cue and watch the client’s response. If the behavior dips, keep the cue and pair it with safe extinction or NCR. If it spikes, lengthen the cue or add other supports. This old lab study reminds us that warning stimuli can flip from excitatory to inhibitory with experience—a handy lever when you need to fade escape-maintained behavior.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
A 15-sec stimulus followed by unavoidable monetary loss was presented to human subjects who were avoiding loss on a free-operant schedule. As has been observed in studies where shock is the aversive event, initial reactions to the pre-loss stimulus were transient increases in overall and stimulus rates. Unlike shock studies, continued training produced decreased rates, in the presence of the 15-sec stimulus, which were maintained in two of three subjects. Subsequent observations indicated that lowered rates were a function of the subject's rate of avoidance responding, the duration of the stimulus, and the scheduling of avoidable losses. Increasing the duration of the stimulus eliminated lowered rates in the presence of the stimulus and subsequent exposures to conditions which previously produced lowered rates did not result in recovery of the phenomenon. Introduction of the pre-loss stimulus on an extinction baseline (avoidable losses were omitted), however, reinstituted lowered rates. It is proposed that the pre-loss stimulus assumed discriminative control over low rates because responding in the presence of the stimulus was ineffective in avoiding the unavoidable loss. Recovery from lowered rates is attributed to the occurrence of avoidable losses during the stimulus period, and maintenance of lowered rates on the extinction schedule to the omission of such avoidable losses.
Journal of the experimental analysis of behavior, 1968 · doi:10.1901/jeab.1968.11-177