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Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience Advance Access published online on November 3, 2006
Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, doi:10.1093/scan/nsl025
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© The Author (2006). Published by Oxford University Press. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org
Received August 15, 2006
Accepted September 17, 2006

Special Issue Paper

Fear of losing money? Aversive conditioning with secondary reinforcers

M. R. Delgado 1, C. D. Labouliere 2, and E. A. Phelps 3 *

1 Department of Psychology, Rutgers University, Newark NJ 07102, USA
2 Department of Psychology, New York University, New York, NY 10003, USA
3 Department of Psychology, New York University, New York, NY 10003, USA; Center for Neural Science, New York University, New York, NY 10003, USA

* To whom correspondence should be addressed.
E. A. Phelps, E-mail: liz.phelps{at}nyu.edu


  Abstract

Money is a secondary reinforcer that acquires its value through social communication and interaction. In everyday human behavior and laboratory studies, money has been shown to influence appetitive or reward learning. It is unclear, however, if money has a similar impact on aversive learning. The goal of this study was to investigate the efficacy of money in aversive learning, comparing it with primary reinforcers that are traditionally used in fear conditioning paradigms. A series of experiments were conducted in which participants initially played a gambling game that led to a monetary gain. They were then presented with an aversive conditioning paradigm, with either shock (primary reinforcer) or loss of money (secondary reinforcer) as the unconditioned stimulus. Skin conductance responses and subjective ratings indicated that potential monetary loss modulated the conditioned response. Depending on the presentation context, the secondary reinforcer was as effective as the primary reinforcer during aversive conditioning. These results suggest that stimuli that acquire reinforcing properties through social communication and interaction, such as money, can effectively influence aversive learning.

Keywords: reward; punishment; striatum; amygdala; incentive; valence; primary reinforcer; fear conditioning; Pavlovian conditioning; neuroeconomics.
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