Variable-interval schedules of timeout from avoidance: effects of chlordiazepoxide, CGS 8216, morphine, and naltrexone.
Anti-anxiety drugs make timeout more aversive, while morphine makes it less—watch for medication effects when you use timeout.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Scientists gave rats a lever that postponed a brief timeout from food.
The rats pressed to keep food coming.
Then the team injected four drugs: a calming benzodiazepine, a blocker for the same drug, morphine, and naltrexone.
They counted how each drug changed timeout-presses and regular food-presses.
What they found
The calming drug made rats press the timeout lever more.
Morphine did the opposite; it cut timeout-presses.
Naltrexone and the blocker had little effect.
Regular food-lever pressing stayed almost the same under every drug.
How this fits with other research
Hirota (1971) first showed rats will work to avoid timeout.
Rutter et al. (1987) simply added drugs to that same setup.
Burgess et al. (1986) also saw morphine change punished responding, but only after special training.
Bell (1999) later found timeout-presses are hard to extinguish, so drug-induced changes may stick around.
Why it matters
If a client takes anti-anxiety medicine, timeout might feel worse and the child may try harder to escape it.
If a client uses morphine-like medicine, timeout may feel less urgent and the child may stay in place.
Check medication side effects before you use timeout.
You might need gentler or different consequences when drugs are in play.
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Join Free →Review each client’s med list; if you see benzodiazepines, plan extra coping tools before placing in timeout.
02At a glance
03Original abstract
Rats were trained on concurrent schedules in which pressing one lever postponed shock and pressing the other occasionally (variable-interval schedule) produced a 2-min timeout during which the shock-postponement schedule was suspended and its correlated stimuli were removed. These procedures provided a baseline for studying the effects of drugs on behavior maintained by different sources of negative reinforcement (shock avoidance and timeout from avoidance). Experiment 1 studied a benzodiazepine agonist, chlordiazepoxide, and antagonist, CGS 8216. Chlordiazepoxide (2.5-30 mg/kg) had little effect on avoidance responding except at higher doses, when it reduced responding. By comparison, responding on the timeout lever was increased in 5 of 6 rats. These effects were reversed by CGS 8216 (2.5-5 mg/kg) in the 2 rats tested, but CGS 8216 had no effect by itself. Experiment 2 studied an opiate agonist, morphine, and antagonist, naltrexone, with 3 rats. Morphine's (2.5-20 mg/kg) effects were opposite those of chlordiazepoxide: At doses that either increased or had no effect on avoidance responding, morphine depressed timeout responding. Naltrexone (5 mg/kg) reversed these actions but had no effect by itself.
Journal of the experimental analysis of behavior, 1987 · doi:10.1901/jeab.1987.47-115