ABSTRACT

The methods of conditioning therapies rest upon certain assumptions concerning the acquisition and extinction of conditioned emotional responses and principally those responses associated with the construct of anxiety. An investigation of manipulated galvanic skin responses (GSR) feedback in an aversion therapy analogue found that extinction can be retarded even when subjects are fully informed that UCS probability is equal to zero. Resistance to extinction was achieved by leading subjects to believe that activity of a visible meter was an accurate reflection of their GSRs to conditioned stimuli during non-shocked trials. Nickel-plated finger electrodes were taped to subject's first and third right-hand fingers and connected to the dermohmeter. The GSR unit changes associated with each conditioned stimulus+ during extinction trials were converted from changes in resistance to log changes in conductance consistent with suggestions by E. A. Haggard and O. L. Lacey and S. Siegel.