CPA and "Conditioned Stimulus Avoidance"

[Cotcha Yankinov]

Say that a patient repeatedly detoxes at a center that has patients wear identification wristbands.

When going through repeated withdrawals while wearing the wristband, couldn't the patient develop something of a "conditioned stimulus avoidance" for the wristband, by virtue of both the visual and tactile senses?


I'm also curious if "conditioned stimulus preference/avoidance" has been applied to audio at all.

Take for example exposing an animal to a 440 Hz tone while they are being reinforced, and then a different tone while they are withdrawing.


My final pondering is whether or not CPA may apply to the basal human sensory experience - for example, the feeling of looking out from eyeballs located in the head, with a particular field of vision and spectrum of colors.

The "place", in conditioned place avoidance, would be the human body itself (the addicts have always had the experience of human vision and so forth whenever they withdraw).

 

[CFC]

When going through repeated withdrawals while wearing the wristband, couldn't the patient develop something of a "conditioned stimulus avoidance" for the wristband, by virtue of both the visual and tactile senses?

Technically - absolutely. However, any patient going through withdrawal is going to be exposed to a number of unique and place-specific stimuli, some of which may be perceived to varying degrees positively (preference) or negatively (avoidance). Thus for a stimulus to condition a suitable response, it would need to perceptibly dominate others.

Given the variety of potential new stimuli in a detox centre (light-dark, shapes, colours, odours, physical sensations, patients, staff, medicines etc) a wristband probably isn't going to rate highly enough to provoke much conditioning for most patients.

I'm also curious if "conditioned stimulus preference/avoidance" has been applied to audio at all.

Take for example exposing an animal to a 440 Hz tone while they are being reinforced, and then a different tone while they are withdrawing.

Yes, particularly the startle response from auditory stimulus. Most studies were performed <1950s, however I think you'll find some more recent ones relating to high-frequency discriminative conditioning in rats (ie devices to deter rats from residential/commercial properties). However I don't think many (any?) of these relate to drug taking or withdrawal.

My final pondering is whether or not CPA may apply to the basal human sensory experience - for example, the feeling of looking out from eyeballs located in the head, with a particular field of vision and spectrum of colors.

The "place", in conditioned place avoidance, would be the human body itself (the addicts have always had the experience of human vision and so forth whenever they withdraw).

I very much doubt it. Going back to the first point, there would need to be something novel or remarkable about the experience for it to cause some discrimination and conditioning. So except perhaps in the case of PDs (etc) causing some kind of massive break/mental illness/depersonalisation/outer-body experience, I'm pretty sure you'd struggle to discriminate for or against something you always experience in the way you're thinking.

 

[Cotcha Yankinov]

Thanks for the thoughts.

It sounds like there would have to be disturbed salience or otherwise disturbed neural function in order for something like withdrawing while wearing a wristband to create appreciable "conditioned stimulus avoidance" associated with that wristband.

I suppose if someone had a traumatic event repeatedly occur while wearing a wristband then they could then have a stress response and so forth (assuming they've developed PTSD) after seeing/wearing the wristband again.

Its interesting that we might assume people could form this strong association between the wristband and the trauma/perpetrator but people repeatedly withdrawing may not form the same strength/genre of connection.

I suppose the relationship being formed between the wristband and the withdrawal vs. the wristband and e.g. a perpetrator/trauma is categorically different in the sense that in the withdrawal, the negative experience is essentially "faceless" while the traumatic experience with a perpetrator may be kicking in circuitry dedicated to faces and social stuff, which I'm sure is a fair bit of the human brain.


This might be a tad off topic, but it seems like a lot of people (girls especially) form these relationships where they get drugs from a guy and then they fall head over heels for him even if he is an imbecile. I wonder if "conditioned person preference" plays some sort of role in that.. The girls associate the guy with getting reinforcing drugs, and their circuitry dedicated to faces and social stuff helps facilitate the conditioning.

In other words, a person may not be able to form the same strength of conditioned relationship with a faceless drug vending machine because that face/social circuitry isn't getting activated.

 

[CFC]

It sounds like there would have to be disturbed salience or otherwise disturbed neural function in order for something like withdrawing while wearing a wristband to create appreciable "conditioned stimulus avoidance" associated with that wristband.

I suppose if someone had a traumatic event repeatedly occur while wearing a wristband then they could then have a stress response and so forth (assuming they've developed PTSD) after seeing/wearing the wristband again.

Its interesting that we might assume people could form this strong association between the wristband and the trauma/perpetrator but people repeatedly withdrawing may not form the same strength/genre of connection.

I suppose the relationship being formed between the wristband and the withdrawal vs. the wristband and e.g. a perpetrator/trauma is categorically different in the sense that in the withdrawal, the negative experience is essentially "faceless" while the traumatic experience with a perpetrator may be kicking in circuitry dedicated to faces and social stuff, which I'm sure is a fair bit of the human brain.

I think it really depends on how their brain writes the memory. There is a subset of the population for whom emotional reactions and various cues (stimuli) can become hard-wired in unanticipated/'faulty' ways, drawing the emphasis of a relatively inert and passive object like a wristband into a more complex emotional narrative. But as a general rule, the closer the object is in relation to the physically or emotionally traumatising experience, the more likely it is to provoke a conditioning outcome.

This might be a tad off topic, but it seems like a lot of people (girls especially) form these relationships where they get drugs from a guy and then they fall head over heels for him even if he is an imbecile. I wonder if "conditioned person preference" plays some sort of role in that.. The girls associate the guy with getting reinforcing drugs, and their circuitry dedicated to faces and social stuff helps facilitate the conditioning.

In other words, a person may not be able to form the same strength of conditioned relationship with a faceless drug vending machine because that face/social circuitry isn't getting activated.

And thus I think what you're ultimately saying is that preferences and reinforcements form across a complex spectrum and to highly nuanced patterns, and that respondent conditioning is both highly plastic and in no way binary - which is what we often lazily assume a Pavlovian-type reaction to be.

In other words, a person may not be able to form the same strength of conditioned relationship with a faceless drug vending machine because that face/social circuitry isn't getting activated.

Yes - both ways. I found a great way to limit my drug use was avoid using darknet sources for drugs - RL-dealers are usually such a shocking mess it's a fantastic disincentive, and I intentionally conflate and reinforce the negative emotions and memories I associate with them to the drug use.