FEATURE | BEHAVIOR MATTERS
One prominent feature of Donaldson’ s“ open bar / closed bar” technique is the stipulation that the“ bar,” or access to the appetitive reward, opens regardless of a dog’ s behavior toward the scary stimulus. Donaldson illustrates this with the following sequence:
• The bar opens every time the scary stimulus appears.
• The bar closes when the scary stimulus disappears.
• The bar consists of something very special the worried dog does not get in any other circumstance. Nothing else but the scary stimulus makes the bar open.
• When the bar is open, the dog’ s behavior doesn’ t matter.
There can be no doubt that counterconditioning as represented by Donaldson’ s open bar / closed bar has offered dog trainers much-needed hope for their reactive, fearful dogs. Yet, I also wonder whether a dog’ s behavior makes no difference: is it really true that a dog’ s behavior during counterconditioning doesn’ t matter? I wonder about this because several recently published scientific studies have suggested that animals’ behavior during counterconditioning not only matters, but also is crucial to the successful outcome of the process. They suggest that an active cognitive processing of the aversive stimulus is critical to an animal’ s ability to overcome fear and anxiety.
The first study relevant to these concerns was published in the early 1970s by Dennis Delprato( 1973). Delprato’ s study attempted to produce an“ animal analogue” to the use of counterconditioning for eliminating fear in humans. To accomplish this, Delprato induced fear avoidance of electrical shocks in laboratory rats: first, by giving them an auditory warning signal and then shocking them through the floor of the long, rectangular box in which they were enclosed. He successfully countered this fear by subsequently feeding the rats food pellets only when they heard the auditory shock warning. Eventually, the rats kept on eating even after hearing the warning that an electrical shock was imminent. On the surface, this might sound like a positive result. After all, isn’ t the purpose of counterconditioning to eliminate an animal’ s anxiety in the presence of a trigger? However, according to Delprato, these positive results were very short lived because, when the food disappeared, so did the effects of the counterconditioning( see also Elizabeth Capaldi, Donna Viveiros, & David Campbell, 1983). When denied access to the food pellets, the rats quickly reverted to their previous fear avoidance behaviors. Delprato’ s study concluded that permanent behavior change requires“ therapeutic techniques that facilitate functional exposure( induce the individual to cognitively accept the aversive stimulus).” In other words, counterconditioning can only achieve its maximum effect if an animal“ cognitively accepts,” i. e., actively interprets and processes information about the conditioned stimulus. A second, much more recent study of counterconditioning corroborates this conclusion and also provides further clues about what this notion of cognitive acceptance might mean.
In their study, Brian Thomas, Marlo Cutler and Cheryl Novak( 2012) begin with the riddle of why counterconditioning has been much more reliable in humans than in non-human animals. They speculate that a major reason for this disparity is the differing expectations underlying the use of this technique. Scientific studies and therapeutic programs directed toward humans routinely ask for intentional responses, such as deep muscle relaxation or creative visualization to access the reward; those targeting non-human animals typically present the appetitive unconditioned stimulus( the food reward) independently of the animals’ behavior. Thomas et. al conjecture that the greater reliability of counterconditioning with humans reflects this differential reinforcement of an instrumental response, and they designed their study to test this thesis. Based on the data generated, the Thomas study concludes that effective counterconditioning requires non-human animals to“ earn” the appetitive unconditioned stimulus( the food reward) much like their human counterparts.
To test this hypothesis, Thomas and his colleagues counterconditioned a group of rats to fear of electric shock by always giving them an appetitive reward – chocolate milk – when they heard a warning signal for the impending shock. A second group of rats only received access to the chocolate milk when they pressed a lever during the warning. The primary aim of Thomas’ s study was to investigate whether requiring rats to engage in a behavior – here, pressing a lever – reduced their fear levels more effectively than by giving them chocolate milk no matter what they did. It is significant, then, that the fear renewal rate in the lever-pressing rats was substantially lower than that those that received unconditional access to chocolate milk. According to the researchers, these outcomes suggest that transforming a feared aversive stimulus into a“ positive discriminative stimulus for instrumental behavior” like pressing a lever may prevent fear renewal more effectively than when the appetitive reward is unconnected to the subject’ s behavior. Both the Delprato and Thomas studies emphasize the importance of active cognitive processing in any use of counterconditioning to produce permanent behavior change.
These studies point to several important reasons why I have found Cognitively Modified Counterconditioning to be more effective than traditional counterconditioning, and I want to illustrate this point with a scenario that dog trainers confront quite frequently: dogs becoming aroused in the presence of other dogs. My subject in this scenario is Emmett, a highly intelligent and very athletic 1-year-old, male German Shepherd. Emmett’ s owner originally contacted me because her dog began lunging and barking at other
The APDT Chronicle of the Dog | Summer 2018 45