ArticleeLife2021
Punishment insensitivity in humans is due to failures in instrumental contingency learning.
Article in eLife, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 20 papers.
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Who cites it
20 citing papers in PubMed, 38 citations in OpenAlex.
- Disinhibition of ventral tegmental area during initial punishment learning causes enduring punishment insensitivity.Neuropsychopharmacology : official publication of the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology · 2026Article
- Prelimbic cortex, but not its nucleus reuniens projections, regulates punished alcohol self-administration.Neuropharmacology · 2026Article
- Risk reshapes amygdala representation of choice.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
- Causal inference and cognitive-behavioral integration deficits drive stable variation in human punishment sensitivity.Communications psychology · 2025Article
- Individual differences in punished alcohol self-administration are unaltered by alcohol vapor exposure.Alcohol (Fayetteville, N.Y.) · 2025Observational
- Current interpretations of the I-PACE model of behavioral addictions.Journal of behavioral addictions · 2025Review
- Role of serotonin neurons in the dorsal raphe nucleus in heroin self-administration and punishment.Neuropsychopharmacology : official publication of the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology · 2025Article
- Punishment-resistant alcohol intake is mediated by the nucleus accumbens shell in female rats.Neuropsychopharmacology : official publication of the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology · 2024Article
- Random interval schedule of reinforcement influences punishment resistance for cocaine in rats.Neurobiology of learning and memory · 2024Article
- Making and breaking habits: Revisiting the definitions and behavioral factors that influence habits in animals.Journal of the experimental analysis of behavior · 2024Review
- Pavlovian Fear Conditioning Is More than You Think It Is.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2023Article
- Article
- Reply to Jarvis and Chong: Understanding punishment insensitivity phenotypes using computational modelling.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2023Article
- Partial reinforcement extinction and omission effects in the elimination and recovery of discriminated operant behavior.Journal of experimental psychology. Animal learning and cognition · 2023Article
- Pathways to the persistence of drug use despite its adverse consequences.Molecular psychiatry · 2023Review
- A cognitive pathway to punishment insensitivity.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2023Article
- Are we compulsively chasing rainbows?Neuropsychopharmacology : official publication of the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology · 2022Review
- Article
- Linking drug and food addiction via compulsive appetite.British journal of pharmacology · 2022Article
- Most rats prefer gambling opportunities featuring win-paired cues that drive risky choice: Synergistic interactions between choice of and choice during the cued rat gambling task.Brain and neuroscience advancesArticle
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
6 authors at 2 institutions in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Punishment maximises the probability of our individual survival by reducing behaviours that cause us harm, and also sustains trust and fairness in groups essential for social cohesion. However, some individuals are more sensitive to punishment than others and these differences in punishment sensitivity have been linked to a variety of decision-making deficits and psychopathologies. The mechanisms for why individuals differ in punishment sensitivity are poorly understood, although recent studies of conditioned punishment in rodents highlight a key role for punishment contingency detection (Jean-Richard-Dit-Bressel et al., 2019). Here, we applied a novel 'Planets and Pirates' conditioned punishment task in humans, allowing us to identify the mechanisms for why individuals differ in their sensitivity to punishment. We show that punishment sensitivity is bimodally distributed in a large sample of normal participants. Sensitive and insensitive individuals equally liked reward and showed similar rates of reward-seeking. They also equally disliked punishment and did not differ in their valuation of cues that signalled punishment. However, sensitive and insensitive individuals differed profoundly in their capacity to detect and learn volitional control over aversive outcomes. Punishment insensitive individuals did not learn the instrumental contingencies, so they could not withhold behaviour that caused punishment and could not generate appropriately selective behaviours to prevent impending punishment. These differences in punishment sensitivity could not be explained by individual differences in behavioural inhibition, impulsivity, or anxiety. This bimodal punishment sensitivity and these deficits in instrumental contingency learning are identical to those dictating punishment sensitivity in non-human animals, suggesting that they are general properties of aversive learning and decision-making.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.