What a relief! The pleasure of threat avoidance

Relief, a pleasurable experience, is often triggered by successful threat avoidance. Although relief is regarded as the positive reinforcer for avoidance behavior, its rewarding nature remains to be demonstrated. In our study, 50 participants responded to cues associated with different magnitudes of monetary values or electrical stimuli. Successful responses to those cues resulted in monetary gains (i.e., rewards) or omissions of electrical stimulation (i.e., relief), followed by a pleasantness rating scale. We also measured physiological arousal via skin conductance. As expected, we found that for reward and relief similarly, higher magnitudes elicited more successful responses, higher pleasantness ratings, and higher skin conductance responses. Moreover, differential reward/relief response patterns predicted later choices between reward and relief cues. These findings indicate that relief induced by threat omissions is functionally equivalent to receiving a reward, confirming that relief is a positive reinforcer for threat avoidance behaviors, which provides a new theoretical perspective on the learning process of active threat avoidance. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).