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Rationale: Pavlovian conditioned responses to cues that signal threat are rapidly acquired and tend to persist over time. However, recent research suggests that the ability to actively avoid or exert control over an anticipated threat can diminish the subsequent expression of Pavlovian responses. Studies in animal models suggest that active avoidance behavior and its consequences may be mediated by dopaminergic function. In the present study, we sought to replicate the finding that active control over threat can attenuate subsequent Pavlovian responding in humans and conducted exploratory analyses testing whether individual differences in blink rate, a putative index of dopaminergic function, might modulate this effect.Methods: Participants underwent Pavlovian aversive conditioning, followed immediately by one of two conditions. In the active avoidance condition, participants had the opportunity to actively prevent the occurrence of an anticipated shock, whereas in a yoked extinction condition, participants passively observed the cessation of shocks, but with no ability to influence their occurrence. The following day, the conditioned stimuli were presented without shock, but both groups of participants had no opportunity to employ active instrumental responses. Blink rate was measured throughout the task, and skin conductance responses served as our index of Pavlovian conditioned responding.Results: Consistent with our previous findings, we observed that the group that could actively avoid the shock on day 1 exhibited attenuated recovery of Pavlovian conditioned responses. Further, we found that individuals in the active avoidance group with higher blink rates exhibited a more robust attenuation of spontaneous recovery.Conclusion: This finding suggests that individual variation in dopaminergic function may modulate the efficacy with which active avoidance strategies can attenuate reactive Pavlovian responses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ecological momentary assessment (EMA) is increasingly used to study suicidal thoughts and behaviors (STBs). There is a potential ethical obligation for researchers to intervene when receiving information about suicidal thoughts in real time. A possible concern, however, is that intervening when receiving responses that indicate high risk for suicide during EMA research may impact how participants respond to questions about suicidal thoughts and thus affect the validity and integrity of collected data. We leveraged data from a study of adults and adolescents (N = 434) recruited during a hospital visit for STBs to examine whether monitoring and intervening on high-risk responses affects subsequent participant responding. Overall, we found mixed support for the notion that intervening on high-risk responses influences participants' ratings. Although we observed some evidence of discontinuity in subsequent responses at the threshold used to trigger response-contingent interventions, it was not clear that such discontinuity was caused by the interventions; lower subsequent responses could be due to effective intervention, participant desire to not be contacted again, or regression to the mean. Importantly, the likelihood of completing surveys did not change from before to after response-contingent intervention. Adolescents were significantly more likely than adults, however, to change their initial suicidal intent ratings from above to below the high-risk threshold after viewing automated response-contingent pop-up messages. Studies explicitly designed to assess the potential impact of intervening on high-risk responses in real-time monitoring research are needed, as this will inform effective, scalable strategies for intervening during moments of high suicide risk. Public Significance Statement: There may be an ethical obligation to intervene when participants in real-time monitoring studies report being at high risk for suicide; however, one possible concern is that intervening could impact how (and whether) participants respond to questions about suicide. Overall, we found some evidence that contacting participants when they report high suicidal intent may impact their responses, although the mechanism through which the lowering of responses occurs is not clear. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]