RT Journal Article
T1 Intolerance of uncertainty as a vulnerability factor for excessive and inflexible avoidance behavior.
A1 Flores, Amanda
A1 López-Gutiérrez, Francisco José
A1 Vervliet, Bram
A1 Cobos-Cano, Pedro Luis
K1 Evitación (Psicología)
AB Recent studies have shown that avoidance behavior may become excessive and inflexible(i.e., detached from its incentive value and resistant to extinction). On the other hand,prospective intolerance of uncertainty (P-IU) has been defined as a factor leading toexcessive responding in uncertain situations. Thus, uncertain avoidance situations may betaken as a relevant scenario to examine the role of intolerance of uncertainty as a factor thatfacilitates excessive and inflexible avoidance behavior. In our experiment, we tested thehypothesis that P-IU is associated with excessive and inflexible avoidance in an outcomedevaluation paradigm. Specifically, healthy participants learned in a free-operantdiscriminative task to avoid an aversive sound, and were tested in extinction to measure thesensitivity of avoidance responses to the devaluation of the sound aversiveness. The resultsshowed that an increase in P-IU was positively associated to an increase in insensitivity to thedevaluation. Moreover, P-IU was also related to an increase in the frequency of avoidanceresponses during the instrumental learning phase, and to resistance to extinction.Interestingly, these associations involving P-IU were still significant when trait anxiety wascontrolled for. The pattern of results suggests that P-IU may be a vulnerability factor forexcessive and inflexible avoidance, which, in turn, has been found to be associated withseveral mental disorders.
PB Elsevier
YR 2018
FD 2018
LK https://hdl.handle.net/10630/35929
UL https://hdl.handle.net/10630/35929
LA eng
NO Flores, A., López, F.J., Vervliet, B. & Cobos, P.L. (2018). Intolerance of uncertainty as a vulnerability factor for excessive and inflexible avoidance behavior. Behaviour Research and Therapy, 104, 34-43
NO Política de acceso abierto tomada de: https://openpolicyfinder.jisc.ac.uk/id/publication/16735
DS RIUMA. Repositorio Institucional de la Universidad de Málaga
RD 21 ene 2026