UCS inflation and human aversive autonomic conditioning.

Fifty students participated in a differential conditioning paradigm. In the first part of the experiment, one neutral slide (CS+) was paired with a tone (UCS) and another neutral slide (CS-) was never followed by a tone. During the subsequent inflation phase, unsignalled UCSs gradually increased in strength for the inflation group while they were kept constant for the control group. During extinction trials, the inflation group initially showed relatively stronger UCS expectancies on the CS+ trials than the control group. In contrast to what was predicted, the UCS inflation procedure did not result in stronger conditioning effects of the skin conductance response compared to the control procedure. The effectiveness of the UCS inflation procedure was not related to trait anxiety.

RCT Entities:   Population Interventions Outcomes