Defensive Responding Research Articles

Effectiveness of the MMPI-2 validity indicators in the detection of defensive responding in clinical and nonclinical samples.

Effectiveness of the MMPI-2 validity indicators in the detection of defensive responding in clinical and nonclinical samples.

Effectiveness of the MMPI–2 validity indicators in the detection of defensive responding in clinical and nonclinical samples.

In this study, patients diagnosed with schizophrenia (n = 38) who had previously completed the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory—2 (MMPI-2) by responding honestly were asked to complete it again with instructions to conceal their symptoms. A student group (n = 49) followed similar instructions. Under instructions to fake good, both students and patients were able to produce clinical profiles that were significantly less pathological. The Other-Deception and Superlative Scales were best at distinguishing fake-good and honest profiles in the student sample. The Edwards Social Desirability Scale and the L scale were best at distinguishin g fake-good and honest profiles in the patient sample. The Wiggins Social Desirability scale was best at distinguishing honestly responding students from patients faking good.

The Effect of Defensive Responding by Substance-Abusing Patients on the Millon Clinical Multiaxial Inventory

This study explored the effect of defensive (i. e., fake-good) responding by substance-abusing patients on the scale scores of the Millon Clinical Multiaxial Inventory (MCMI-II; Millon, 1987). Patients asked to respond honestly (N = 62) had significantly higher scores on most of the scales than patients who were instructed to respond defensively (N = 62) and forensic subjects suspected of abusing psychoactive substances (N = 54). Significantly fewer subjects in the defensive responding simulation and the forensic group had elevated the Drug Dependence and Alcohol Dependence scales compared to the honestly responding patients. These results indicate that most drug-abusing individuals can conceal the presence of a substance-related disorder, as reflected by scale scores on the MCMI-II, if motivated to do so.

Effects of single restraint on the defensive behavior of male and female rats

The effects of single aversive stimulation due to restraint (RT) on behavioral responses to unfamiliar conspecifics were studied in male and female rats. The Resident-intruder paradigm was adopted, RT animals and their controls playing the role of intruders. Introductory and agonistic behaviors of both intruders and residents were recorded. In males, RT increased both the number of subjects which showed freezing and freezing duration, and this was independent of the amount of aggression received by the residents. By contrast, no change was found in active defense. Increased passive defense was not paralleled by a complete inhibition of aggression. The latter was rare, but not absent, and occurred in RT males as often as in their controls. Females never showed freezing and, unlike males, resorted to a fully active defensive strategy. RT females were the preferential targets of residents' high-intensity aggression, but showed the same rate of defensive responding as control females. The crucial role played in studies of social behavior by testing conditions and mutual influences between the behavior of experimental subjects and residents are discussed.

Neuroticism and defensive responding

This study explored the relationship between responses to the Eysenck Personality Inventory (EPI) Neuroticism Scale (N) and defensive responding. The EPI and the Marlowe Crowne Social Desirability Scale (SD) were administered to 157 college students. Repressors (REP), characterized by defensive responding, were defined by median splits on N and SD as low N and high SD. As predicted, REPs scored lower on N than truly low anxious subjects, low N and low SD. Also consistent with expectation, there were significantly fewer defensive high anxious subjects, high N and high SD. The first of these findings replicates Plante and Schwartz (1990). The second is consistent with Weinberger, Schwartz and Davidson (1979). A low correlation was found between extraversion and SD while the correlation between the EPI Lie Scale and SD was high enough to suggest some similarity ( r = 0.33, P < 0.001) but low enough to indicate that it would not be a suitable replacement for SD in detecting defensive responding on N.

Detecting Malingered and Defensive Responding on the MMPI-2 in a Forensic Inpatient Sample

The purpose of this study was to examine the effectiveness of the various validity scales and indices on the MMPI-2 to detect malingered (fake-bad), and defensive (fake-good) responding. The entire sample consisted of 165 college students who completed the MMPI-2 under one of three conditions--fake-bad, fake-good, or respond honestly--and 173 forensic inpatients who completed the test as part of a routine evaluation. To detect faking-good and faking-bad, cutting scores for the validity scales and indices were established from the fake-good and fake-bad groups and were compared to the honest and patient groups. Corresponding sensitivity and specificity rates were then determined. Four validity indicators appeared to be moderately effective-at detecting fake-bad profiles: F, F--K, the MMPI-2 version of revised Gough Dissimulation Scale, and Wiener's Obvious-Subtle index, whereas the fake-good indicators were much less effective--only F--K and the Obvious-Subtle index appeared to have moderate utility.

Ultrasounds during agonistic interactions between female rats (Rattus norvegicus).

Defensive and vocal behaviors of 18 female Long-Evans rats (Rattus norvegicus) in encounters with aggressive, lactating conspecifics were examined in order to determine if female rats emit ultrasounds during agonistic interactions and to characterize any such calls. The subjects, selected during estrus or diestrus, were exposed to 1-min attacks at 25-min intervals. Between attacks the subjects were threatened by the aggressor but protected by a wire-mesh cage. Female rats emitted both high- (32-60 kHz) and low-frequency (20-32 kHz) ultrasonic calls in agonistic encounters, with the rate of high-frequency calls enhanced during estrus. Low-frequency ultrasounds were shorter in duration and higher in frequency than those emitted by male rats in similar conditions. We conclude that female rats emit ultrasonic calls during defensive responding and that the characteristics and rate of calling vary as functions of sex and gonadal hormone state.

Morphine attenuates antipredator ultrasonic vocalizations in mixed-sex rat colonies

Mixed-sex groups of laboratory rats living in a visible burrow system (VBS) emit 18–27 kHz ultrasound and retreat to the burrow when a cat is placed in the open area of the VBS. The total duration of ultrasonic vocalizations was reliably reduced by pretreatment with 5 mg/kg morphine. In a subsequent study using male-female colony pairs, presentation of a cat to individual rats in the absence of their colony mate indicated significant gender differences in base frequency, degree of emission, and characteristics of pulses elicited. Specifically, females showed a greater number and duration of vocalizations, of higher frequency(kHz), and with shorter individual pulse durations than males. In the same study, morphine (5 mg/kg) produced a general decrease in the level of ultrasonic emissions in both sexes, reduced the mean base frequency (kHz), and increased the mean duration of individual pulses. These data suggest that endogenous opioid mechanisms may be involved in the mediation of ultrasonic vicalization in response to a predator, and are discussed with reference to known involvement of such systems in defensive responding.

The Effects of Confrontation and Clarification on Patient Affective and Defensive Responding

This study examined the effects of therapist confrontations and clarifications on patient defensive and affective responding in short-term dynamic psychotherapy. Four videotaped therapy sessions from each of 16 patients were coded on a per-minute basis for the occurrence of selected patient and therapist variables. Contrary to prediction, no significant differences were found regarding the effects of confrontation and clarification of defense on immediate patient affective responding. In addition, therapist confrontation of patient defensive behavior elicited significantly more defensive responding than did clarification. Results also indicated that, within a 3-minute frame, patients' affective and defensive responding in minute 3 is most closely related to their own behavior in minute 1 regardless of the intervening therapist activity. Future research, it is suggested, needs to focus on a longer time frame as well as on the cumulative effects of persistent confrontations on patient affective responding.

Sex effects in defensive behavior: Baseline differences and drug interactions

Female rats consistently show a pattern of differences in defensive behaviors compared to males which parallel the effects of exposure to a nonpainful threat stimulus (cat or cat odor) in the same tests and measures. These indications of greater defensiveness for females are particularly common in situations involving potential, as opposed to actual and present, threat, a factor which probably also reflects ceiling or floor effects in situations involving very intense defensiveness. In addition, pharmacological studies indicate sex differences in the effects of selective serotonin (5-HT) receptor agonists and antagonists on defensive responding. These findings indicate that sex effects must be considered in studies of the pharmacological control of defensive behaviors, and suggest that responsivity to sex effects may be an additional criterion for the suitability of animal models of anxiety.

Personality, temperament and the cardiac defense response

Biologically based personality measures were compared between subjects who showed secondary accelerative cardiac defensive responding (Accelerators) and subjects whose heart rate (HR) remained relatively unchanged (non-Accelerators) during this interval following high-intensity auditory stimulation. Introverts (low E), subjects with high Neuroticism (N) scores and subjects with low Strength of Excitation (SE) and Strength of Inhibition (SI) scores showed higher levels of HR throughout the experiment than extraverts, stable subjects and subjects with high SE and SI scores. In addition, subjects with low SE and Mobility (M) scores showed a more pronounced secondary HR accelerative response than subjects with high SE and M scores. Implications for constitutional aspects of the cardiac defense response and for individual differences in susceptibility to hypertension are discussed.

Diazepam changes risk assessment in an anxiety/defense test battery

An anxiety/defense test battery was designed to assess defensive reactions of laboratory rats to situations associated with nonpainful threat (exposure to a cat). The battery measured three defense patterns, movement inhibition, risk assessment behaviors, and inhibition of nondefensive behaviors, in two tasks. Diazepam (4.0 mg/kg) altered four of five risk assessment measures, but failed to show an anxiolytic effect on movement inhibition, and had minimal and inconsistent effects on inhibition of nondefensive behaviors. The risk assessment changes with diazepam were all consistent with an anxiolytic action of diazepam. These results provide a partial contrast to the general lack of anxiolytic action of diazepam in a fear/defense test battery designed to measure reactions to a discrete, present, threat stimulus, and suggest a greater diazepam effect on risk assessment than on other aspects of defensive responding. Sex differences indicating higher defensiveness for female than male rats were obtained on many of these measures.

Self-Esteem and Defensiveness: An Analysis of the Self-Esteem Inventory

A structural equation model was developed to examine the relationships between the self-esteem and defensiveness scales of the Coopersmith Self-esteem Inventory. Data were analysed for a sample of over 800 New Zealand children using methods of confirmatory factor analysis. The fitted model suggested that the data were consistent with an hierarchical model in which the observed self-esteem scores were fallible indicators of self-esteem in four specific areas of experience. These areas in turn were subsumed by a higher-order factor of global self-esteem. The model also suggested that defensive responding systematically contaminated the subjects' over-all reporting of self-esteem. Model estimates showed that between 28% and 54% of the variance in the self-esteem indicators arose from random errors of measurement and a further 1% to 3% was due to the effects of defensiveness. It is suggested that confirmatory factor analytic methods should be used in further analyses of the relationship between self-esteem and other measures to take account of possible biases arising from these sources.

Unfamiliar environments impair information processing as measured by behavioral and cardiac orienting responses to auditory stimuli in preweanling and adult rats.

Placing animals in an unfamiliar environment triggers at least two major reactions: (1) a heightened state of arousal, fear, or distress and (2) a sharp increase in information processing as the animal attempts to learn about its new environment. These changes could have a profound effect on the way in which the animal reacts to the types of extraneous innocuous stimuli typically used to study learning and memory. For example, an increase in arousal or fear could either (1) make the animal more "attentive" to stimulus change resulting in a larger orienting response, or (2) produce a shift from orienting to defensive responding. Conversely, processing of the new stimuli present in the unfamiliar environment may make the animal less responsive to additional extrinsic stimulation. These possibilities were examined experimentally using both autonomic and behavioral measures of orienting and defensive responses. The results demonstrated that animals fail to exhibit either an orienting response or a defensive response to a novel auditory stimulus when they are first placed in an unfamiliar environment. With continued exposure to the test environment the orienting response appears and then shows a time-dependent increase in magnitude. This pattern of results was obtained in both preweaning and young adult rats. On the basis of additional research and analysis, it was concluded that a limitation in information processing capacity was the primary reason for the failure of the orienting response to occur when an animal is first placed in an unfamiliar test chamber.

Individual differences in autonomic response: conditioned association or conditioned fear?

ABSTRACTCluster analysis was used to define three groups of subjects whose conditioned heart rate response emphasized either acceleration, deceleration, or moderate deceleration. A subject pool (N = 148) was generated from four separate studies of differential classical conditioning in which colored slides served as conditioned stimuli (CSs) and the unconditioned stimulus (UCS) was aversive auditory noise. Both the statistically generated Accelerator and Decelerator groups responded with a significant late interval deceleration to CS+. However, only Accelerators also displayed a significant mid‐interval heart rate increase to CS+. Conditioned electrodermal responses were significantly more resistant to extinction for Accelerators than for the other two cluster groups. Accelerators also differed from Decelerators in that their affective judgments of the slide stimuli became less positively valent and less dominant from pre‐ to post‐conditioning, effects not found for Decelerators. Moderate Decelerators produced mixed results across the several psychophysiological and verbal measures of conditioning, resembling Accelerators in their verbal report change, and Decelerators in their rapid electrodermal extinction.It is suggested that cluster assignment may reflect subjects' pre‐conditioning learning set. All successfully conditioned subjects appear to learn a relationship between stimuli such that the appearance of the CS+ prompts an anticipatory orienting response (late interval heart rate deceleration). Accelerators differ from the other two groups in that they also condition a defensive response which is associated with a change in emotional judgments of the stimuli and may represent covert preparation for avoidance. The relationships between defensive responding, avoidance, and the concept of fear are considered, and the problem of desynchrony in emotional change (i.e., the Moderate Decelerators) is addressed. Finally, parallels are drawn between results from classical conditioning and clinical studies of fear and phobia, and further suggestions are made for utilizing the conditioning paradigm in the study of emotion.

Cardiac response as an index of the effect of aversion therapy

Recent research shows that aversion conditioning produces conditioned aversions to target stimuli. Conditioned aversions are manifest in the following posttreatment changes in Ss' responses to target stimuli: increased negative evaluations, decreased contact or consumption, and increased phasic heart-rate responses (HRRs). Research on aversion therapy for additive disorders reveals that HRR is a particularly important index of therapeutic change as it is predictive of latency to relapse to drug use. We speculate that aversion conditioning increases Ss' fear and repugnance of target stimuli, that HRRs accurately reflect such defensive responses and that magnitude of defensive response is positively related to latency to relapse. In addition to defensive responding, we believe that HRRs may reflect coping-response or active-avoidance information processing.

Rat Defensive Behavior: Burying an Operandum Associated with Reinforcement

Three experiments investigated the relation between defensive burying and water-reinforced operant responding. In Experiment 1, three rats buried a lever, which had previously been instrumental in delivering water rein-forcement, after receiving a shock through the lever. In Experiment 2, three rats buried a lever following two successive lever shocks delivered while they pressed it for water. Pressing recovered, but when shocks were delivered again eight sessions later, burying persisted longer and lever pressing recovered more slowly than after the initial shock deliveries. In Experiment 3, no burying occurred when lever pressing for water was placed on extinction. It appears that the elicitation of conditioned defensive burying requires the delivery of a discrete aversive stimulus.

Characteristics of schizophrenics' and neurotics' relatives

A group of adult first-degree relatives of schizophrenics were compared with a control sample of neurotics' relatives on the EPQ, an earlier version of the Eysenck P scale, and on three specially-constructed scales of ‘psychoticism’ (STA, STB and S), derived from a consideration of the clinical symptomatology of schizophrenia and of the ‘borderline syndromes’. Overall differences, in a predictable direction, were confined to the EPQ P scale where schizophrenics' relatives had significantly higher scores, though further analysis suggested that this was due partly to the raised scores of males and partly to very low P-scores seen in male neurotics' relatives. Scores on the STA, measuring schizophrenic ‘symptoms’, were very low in schizophrenics' relatives, due, it was argued, to extremely defensive responding in that group. Results are also reported for two psychophysiological measures, forearm EMG and skin conductance. Here marked group differences were observed, schizophrenics' relatives having significantly higher mean EMG and significantly lower mean skin conductance. This unusual pattern of response was especially evident in a small subgroup of schizophrenics' relatives whose personality profiles tended to differ in the predictable direction, towards greater ‘psychoticism’. The psychophysiological data were highly consistent with other results from our laboratory demonstrating a ‘dissociation’ between different measures of ‘arousal’ in high-P normal subjects and in psychotic patients and it was concluded that measures based on such a conception of the biological basis of schizophrenia offer considerable promise as high-risk indicators of psychopathology.

Defensive behaviors in rats following septal and septal--amygdala lesions.

Rats with anterior septal lesions showed a pattern of consistent enhancement of defensive behaviors normally elicited by threatening conspecifics, with no enhancement of attack or general reactivity. Further division of this group indicated that damage to sites anterior and ventral to the septal area, sites previously implicated in the "septal syndrome," produces maximal effect on these behaviors. When amygdala lesions are combined with septal damage this enhanced defensive responding is almost completely eliminated. These results were interpreted as indicating that the septal syndrome represents hyperdefensiveness to conspecific threat stimuli rather than aggression or increased general reactivity, and that amygdaloid mechanisms are also involved in the regulation of conspecific defensive behaviors.

Orienting and defensive responding in the electrodermal system: palmar-dorsal differences and recovery rate during conditioning to potentially phobic stimuli.

ABSTRACTIt was suggested that the effects of fear‐relevant pictures as conditioned stimuli (CSs) for electrodermal responses may be explained if it is assumed that they produce conditioned defense responses (DRs), as opposed to the orienting responses (ORs) that are produced by fear‐irrelevant stimuli. Some propositions in Edelberg's theory of electrodermal activity were used to differentiate between DRs and ORs in a test of this hypothesis. Groups of subjects were conditioned to fear‐relevant (snakes and spiders) or fear‐irrelevant (flowers and mushrooms) CSs by means of an aversive (electric shock) or a non‐aversive (imperative signal for a reaction time (RT) task) unconditioned stimulus in long interval differential paradigms. The neutral‐shock, phobic‐RT, and neutral‐RT groups showed no palmar‐dorsal differences either in magnitude, probability or amplitude, and no conditioning in the recovery rate measure. However, the phobic‐shock group showed a peak of dorsal magnitude early in training that subsequently habituated whereas the palmar magnitude data indicated a gradual conditioning effect that lasted throughout the 20 extinction trials. In addition, it showed slower recovery to the reinforced than to the nonreinforced stimulus. These data are taken as support for the hypothesis.