Reinstatement of negatively reinforced behavior with rats
Even when clients no longer need to escape, the old escape behavior can roar back if the aversive event shows up again.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Velasquez et al. (2025) worked with rats that could escape mild shock by pressing a lever. The shock stayed on if they did nothing. After the rats learned this escape, the researchers turned the shock off for all lever presses. This is extinction. The rats stopped pressing.
Next, the team gave free, response-independent timeouts. Shock still happened, but now it paused on its own. Most rats started pressing again. This shows reinstatement with negative reinforcement.
What they found
Free timeouts brought the escape lever presses back. The behavior had been extinguished, yet it returned when the negative reinforcer reappeared without any response.
This is the first clear lab proof that reinstatement is not just for food or praise. It also happens with relief from something bad.
How this fits with other research
Kimball et al. (2025) looked at renewal plus response-dependent reinstatement. They saw bigger relapse when the reinforcer came only after a response. Velasquez shows the opposite setup: free reinforcers still trigger relapse. Together, they warn that any return of the old reinforcer, earned or not, can revive problem behavior.
Bai et al. (2016) showed that adding reinforced alternative behavior during training makes extinction harder and relapse bigger. Velasquez extends this idea into negative reinforcement, showing that the way we arrange reinforcers early on keeps echoing after we try to remove them.
Thrailkill et al. (2018) found that richer positive reinforcement during training causes more spontaneous recovery. Velasquez mirrors this with negative reinforcement: once the aversive event returns, even at low rates, the old escape behavior surges back.
Why it matters
If you are fading escape-maintained problem behavior, watch for any reappearance of the aversive event. Alarms, social demands, or loud rooms that come back on their own can reboot the very responses you just extinguished. Build in checks: keep the aversive stimulus absent longer, or teach an easy alternative that still removes it. Also, probe for relapse after weekends or breaks, not just after the first week of treatment.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
Reinstatement refers to the recurrence of extinguished behavior following response-dependent or -independent exposure to stimuli such as reinforcers, stressors, or reinforcer-correlated cues. Despite broad research on this form of behavioral relapse, little is known about reinstatement of behavior previously maintained by negative reinforcement. The present study explored reinstatement of negatively reinforced behavior with rats under a timeout-from-avoidance procedure. First, responses to the timeout lever could produce 2-min timeouts from a free-operant avoidance schedule wherein shocks could be postponed by pressing an avoidance lever. Then, timeout responding was extinguished by withholding timeouts while the avoidance response continued to postpone shocks. Finally, response-independent timeouts were delivered as the avoidance schedule remained unchanged. The results showed that extinguished timeout responding was reinstated in most subjects following the delivery of response-independent timeouts. These findings expand the generality of the reinstatement effect reported with positive reinforcement to another functional class of behavior and provide an animal model to extend research on behavioral relapse.
Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior, 2025 · doi:10.1002/jeab.70034