The presence of a temporal discrimination in the conditioned emotional response with humans

Six college students participated in matching-to-sample tasks. Conditioned emotional response (CER) training consisted of pairing a tone with a "painful" level of shock. Three of the subjects demonstrated response suppression, one subject showed facilitation, and two showed no change. Analysis of response rate during the tone interval indicated that, for those subjects who showed response suppression, the decrease in response rate was greatest immediately before onset of the unconditioned stimulus. This temporal discrimination was similar to that obtained with infrahumans.