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International Journal of Psychophysiology, 7 (1989) 19-23
HR_decelerative89.doc
Human Pavlovian HR decelerative conditioning with negative tilt
as US: a review of some S-R, stimulus-substitution evidence
John J. Furedy \ Donna Shulhan’ and David C. Randall 2
1
Department of Psychology, University of Toronto, Toronto, Ont. (Canada) and 2 Department Physiology-Biophysics,
University of Kentucky, College of Medicine, Lexington, KY 40536 (U.S.A.)
(Accepted 28 June 1988)
Key words: Human Pavlovian heart rate-decelerative conditioning; Negative tilt unconditioned stimulus; Heart
rate-decelerative unconditioned response; Stimulus substitution; Self-regulation vs cognitive accounts of conditioning
Interest in human Pavlovian heart rate (HR) conditioning with conventional shock and loud noise unconditional stimuli has
declined, as measured by reports in the literature. Accompanying this decline have been the following views: (a) that HR should
be abandoned as a psychophysiological index of the psychological (learning) process of Pavlovian conditioning; (b) that,
following psychology's shift to a more cognitive emphasis, the self-regulation (S-R), stimulus-substitution view of Pavlovian
conditioning is wrong, because there is no equivalence in direction between shock- and loud noise-induced HR-accelerative
unconditional response and the conditional response. This paper reviews recent reports of human Pavlovian conditioning of HR
deceleration with negative tilt as the unconditional stimulus. The results support an S-R, stimulus-substitution interpretation of
conditioning. In addition, these studies have potential therapeutic application in the teaching of (medically desirable) HR
deceleration, especially when Pavlovian procedures are combined with instrumental (biofeedback) ones. However, such
physiological aspects of the decelerative unconditioned response as the degree of vagal involvement are difficult to investigate
in the human preparation.
INTRODUCTION
Pavlovian conditioning is a psychological process in which a conditional stimulus (CS),
through association with an unconditional
stimulus (US), comes to elicit a conditional
response (CR). This form of associative learning
has been of particular interest both to
psychophysiology and to psychological learning
theory when heart rate (HR) has been the
measured dependent variable, and (accelerationinduced) shocks or loud noises were employed as
USs. The problem has been that although the
unconditioned response (UR) is accelerative, the
CRs have been variously multiphasic
Correspondence: J.J. Furedy, Department of Psychology,
University of Toronto, Toronto, Ont., Canada M5S 1Al.
(Hendrick and Graham, 1969; Zeaman et al.,
1954) decelerative (Wood and Obrist, 1964) or
accelerative (Zeaman and Smith, 1965). The lack
of CR/UR topographical similarity has led some
psychophysiologists to abandon the use of HR as
a measure of the psychological process of
Pavlovian conditioning, and focus instead on the
physiological mechanisms (i.e. 'mediators')
responsible for producing the HR changes
elicited by certain signal stimuli. More generally,
in psychophysiology this has led to the claim by
some influential workers that the so-called
'indexing' view of psychophysiology should be
abandoned. The 'indexing' view is that one can
fruitfully use physiological measures to study
psychological processes, and it has been
forcefully attacked by Obrist (1976, 1981). A
modified 'indexing' view has been more recently
defended by Furedy (1983) and Furedy et al.
(1984).
20
The HR data also had considerable impact on
psychological learning theory. In particular, the
data were strongly influential in the decline of the
self-regulating (S-R), stimulus-substitution view
of Pavlovian conditioning. Although the S-R
position does not require CR/UR identity in
magnitude, any dissimilarity in the direction of
the two responses is quite difficult for the view to
explain. The S-R position in psychology was also
weakened by the so-called 'paradigm shift' from
S-R to cognitive psychology, noted in a wellknown paper by Segal and Lachman (1972).
Accordingly, most current students of Pavlovian
conditioning have decided that such conditioning
is essentially a cognitive, sign-significate learning
process rather than an S-R one. (For further
details of this cognitive shift in Pavlovian
conditioning theorising, see also Furedy, 1973;
Furedy and Riley, 1987.)
THE HUMAN NEGATIVE-TILT PAVLOVIAN
PREPARATION: SOME EXPERIMENTAL
EVIDENCE
The change to a more cognitive emphasis may
be a matter of interpretation. What is a more
objective trend in human Pavlovian autonomic
conditioning is that in the last 15 years there has
been an almost total absence of HR-based papers
with the conventional shock and loud-noise USs.
It is probable that one important reason for this
lack of experimenter interest is that in human
experiments the (acceleratory) UR produced by
these USs is not large (of the order of 4 bpm),
and, worse still, habituates rapidly over trials. On
the other hand, although more difficult to instrument, a rapid negative-tilt US where the subject
drops from a 45° head-up to a 45° head-down
position in 1.7 s, is a repeatable stimulus that
produces non-habituating, fast-recruiting, and
large-magnitude
(35 bpm)
phasic
HR
decelerative URs (Furedy and Poulos, 1976,
Expt. I).
Studies of the CR with the negative-tilt US
have generally been consistent with an S-R,
stimulus-substitution position. The direction of
the CR is, like that of the UR, decelerative,
although its magnitude of about 5 bpm with the
initial form
of the preparation is much smaller than that of the
UR (Furedy and Poulos, 1976, Expt. II). As noted
above, the S-R position does not require CR/UR
identity with respect to magnitude, but only to
direction. Another S-R-like feature is that conditioning appears to be impossible even with
repeated sessions if the interstimulus interval
(ISI) is extended from 1 to 5 s (Furedy and
Poulos, 1976). From a cognitive, sign-significate
position, this would not be expected because,
quite clearly, normal undergraduate subjects
quickly become aware of the CS-US relationship
(tilt following tone) whether the tone-tilt interval
is 1 or 5 s. It is also interesting to note that in
Malmo's (1963, 1965) Pavlovian HR-decelerative
conditioning rat preparation (to be discussed
below), the CS-US interval was also relatively
short (2.5 s), in contrast to the 8-10-s CS-US
intervals used by later, more cognitively-oriented
workers.
In striving to increase the magnitude of the
decelerative tilt-conditioning human CR, we
developed an 'imaginational' form of the preparation whereby part of the CS was the instruction
for subjects to imagine the US; the other two
components of this complex CS were the (taperecorded) order to 'drop' (one's head back), and
the rolling of one's eyes back at CS onset (to try
to duplicate the visual imagery of the actual tilt
US). This 'imaginational' preparation produced
larger (about 10 bpm) CRs (Furedy and Klajner,
1978) and it was also found that imagery did,
indeed, play a role in the conditioning process
(Arabian, 1981; Arabian and Furedy, 1983). It
may superficially seem that this evidence for the
importance of a 'mental' factor supports the more
modem,
cognitive
view
of
Pavlovian
conditioning. However, as detailed elsewhere
(Arabian, 1981; Arabian and Furedy, 1983;
Furedy, 1976; Furedy and Riley, 1987), the US
image, though mental, is not a propositional
expectancy, and is quite different from the CSUS contingency learning concept that underlies
the cognitive interpretation of Pavlovian
conditioning. It also bears emphasis that, along SR lines, the imagery factor appeared to enhance
the topographical similarity between UR and CR,
as regards magnitude (Arabian, 1981; Furedy and
Klajner, 1978) and increased recovery time
(Arabian and Furedy, 1983). Accordingly, the
21
negative-tilt preparation appears to support a
stimulus-substitution, S-R account of Pavlovian
conditioning, wherein 'remembering the response'
(Furedy, 1979) here the UR, seems to be important.
It is interesting to note that just as the
cognitive shift was gathering force, there was a
preparation developed by Malmo (1963) which
employed an S-R, stimulus-substitution rationale
to
produce
HR-decelerative
Pavlovian
conditioning. This preparation used rewarding
intracranial brain stimulation as the US, which
was found to produce reliable, large-magnitude,
and non-habituating HR decelerations as the UR
(in contrast to shock and loud-noise USs which
produce habituating accelerative (URs). Also, as
indicated above, the CS-US interval was a
relatively short 2.5 s, though longer than 1 s in
order to allow measurement of the (anticipatory)
CR on all reinforced trials, and therefore avoid
the necessity of using CS-alone test trials to
assess conditioning (Malmo, 1963, pp. 28-29).
The results (Malmo, 1963, Fig. 11; see also
Malmo, 1965) yielded highly orderly acquisition
and
extinction
functions,
and
various
observations were provided to rule out non-associative factors like sensitization. As in the human negative-tilt preparation, the CR and UR
were in the same (decelerative) direction.
However, presumably because of the cognitive
Zeitgeist,
the
rat
intracranial-stimulation
preparation gained little attention, although the
data were orderly and the experimental
methodology rigorous. Indeed, despite the
stimulus-substitution
orientation
and
geographical location of the first author, he was
not aware of the rat preparation when the human
negative-tilt preparation was being developed,
and did not cite Malmo (1963, 1965) in the first
systematic description of the negative-tilt
preparation (Furedy, 1976).
POTENTIAL APPLICATIONS TO BIOFEEDBACK: THE COMBINED PAVLOVIAN-INSTRUMENTAL PREPARATION
Besides its theoretical significance, the human
negative-tilt preparation also appears to have im-
plications for the more applied problem of how to
teach people the (medically desirable) behavior
of HR deceleration. There is a consensus that
conventional
biofeedback
(instrumentalconditioning) techniques have generally been
unsuccessful, as they have produced only 1 or 2
bpm decelerative changes in systematically
controlled group studies (Blanchard and Young,
1973). The Pavlovian form of the negative-tilt
preparation
appears
to
produce
larger
decelerations, although it bears emphasis that
these are quite phasic, lasting only a few seconds.
In addition, as detailed elsewhere (Furedy, 1976)
there is the possibility of a combined Pavlovianbiofeedback approach which is based on the idea
that, before trying to shape a response through
feedback, one must (through Pavlovian
conditioning) establish it in the first place. This
idea may be particularly germane in the case of
HR deceleration, because sinus arrhythmic variation makes it difficult, if not impossible, to identify and work with responses of the order of only
1 or 2 bpm.
Some preliminary experimental investigations
of the combined Pavlovian/biofeedback preparation have produced promising, but puzzling results. In brief, and as detailed elsewhere (Furedy,
1979, pp. 215-216), one study used the tilt as a
(contingent) reinforcer. The schedule was set at
about 80%, and in the experimental group, tilt
reinforcement was delivered with a minimal
delay contingent on decelerative HR performance
from 3 to 5 s following CS (or SD) onset. The
control condition employed a form of noncontingency — argued elsewhere (Furedy, 1979,
1985, 1987; Furedy and Riley, 1982; Furedy and
Shulhan, 1987; Furedy et al., 1988) to be the only
adequate control for instrumental conditioning or
biofeedback — in which the same number of tilts
followed the CS delivered 3, 4, or 5 s after CS
onset, but independently with decelerative
anticipatory HR performance. The mean
experimental
deceleration
of
9.6
bpm
significantly exceeded that of the controls (5.3
bpm). However, all subjects underwent a withinsubject
acquisition-extinction-reacquisition
manipulation, and the unexpected and inexplicable results that emerged showed no decrease
in decelerative performance during the middle
(extinction) phase.
22
A different but equally puzzling set of findings
emerged in another study, detailed elsewhere
(Furedy, 1979, pp. 216-219). In this experiment
two groups of subjects were given a combined
imaginational Pavlovian/biofeedback preparation
in which the tilt served as US and verbal reinforcement (contingent on anticipatory HR deceleration during a 5-s CS-US interval) was provided as feedback. One of the two groups
received
prior
imaginational
Pavlovian
conditioning with a 5-s CS-US interval and noncontingent verbal reinforcement. With this long
CS-US interval, and consistent with the results of
Furedy and Poulos (1976) using a conventional
tone CS, there was no evidence of HRdecelerative conditioning in the prior-Pavlovianconditioning group. Nor were there any
differences in HR between the two groups during
the Pavlovian/biofeedback preparation. However,
we also measured ECG T-wave amplitude
(TWA), which is an adequate though not perfect
index of sympathetic activity (see e.g. Furedy and
Heslegrave, 1983; for an opposing view, see e.g.
Schwartz and Weiss, 1983). During the
Pavlovian-biofeedback procedure, the priorPavlovian group, in comparison to the other
group, showed an anticipatory (and hence
learned) increase in TWA of over 150 PV which
is thrice the 5O+V change that is considered to be
clinically significant. This influence of prior
Pavlovian conditioning was covert, because there
was no evidence of TWA conditioning during the
prior Pavlovian conditioning procedure. This
covert influence, moreover, emerged not in the
index being contingently reinforced (HR), but in
another index (TWA).
CONCLUSIONS
The human negative tilt preparation appears to
have yielded some interesting and relatively
large-magnitude effects. In addition the results
support an S-R approach to conditioning.
However, it is also clear that our understanding
of the basic Pavlovian and instrumental
conditioning processes is severely incomplete.
One limitation has been that our investigation has
been restricted to what has elsewhere been
termed a psycho physiological
level of enquiry (Furedy et al., 1984). Yet there
are physiological issues that are relevant not only
from a physiological, but also from a
psychophysiological point of view. For example,
for both the scientific (learning-theory) and
applied (teaching of HR deceleration) aspects of
the negative-tilt preparation, it would be useful to
determine the relative contributions of the two
branches of the autonomic nervous system to the
production of the decelerative UR. Again, one
would want to know what other cardiovascular
functions, such as blood pressure, are doing while
HR is undergoing such a dramatic change. A first
step in such physiological investigations is
reported in the immediately following paper.
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