Passage on the Way Home from a Routine Visit to the the Pediatrician

Passage
On the way home from a routine visit to the pediatrician, Sarah stops with her infant son at the local convenience store.  As she is waiting in line, a man squeezes in closely behind them and sneezes.  As Sarah walks home, she finds that her heart is racing, she feels nauseous, and she is terrified that her child will become severely ill.Soon after, she becomes obsessed with disease and contamination.  She begins to take extensive measures to "decontaminate" herself and her home, including washing her hands dozens of times daily.  These cleaning rituals have the immediate effect of lessening Sarah's anxiety, so she soon spends most of her day performing them.  She seeks treatment from a therapist, who instructs her to gradually expose herself to "contamination" but refrain from her cleaning rituals.  The therapist also teaches Sarah how to recognize and modify her maladaptive thoughts about illness prevention.  Within several weeks, Sarah finds that she can manage her thoughts about disease and contamination without resorting to ritualistic cleaning.A researcher hypothesized that individuals with obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) , such as Sarah, would show a more generalized fear response to safe stimuli compared to controls.  Generalized conditioned fear responses occur when individuals react with fear to stimuli that resemble the original conditioned stimulus (eg, someone injured in an accident with a red truck fears all red vehicles) .  The researcher conditioned 100 individuals (50 with OCD and 50 controls) to associate a shock with a visual stimulus.  In phase 1, participants viewed a computer screen that alternated between images of a small ring (1 cm) and a large ring (20 cm) .  The small ring and large ring were displayed for 1 second each, with a blank screen in between for 5 seconds.  A mild electric shock was paired with the large ring, and no shock was paired with the small ring.  This was repeated for 10 trials.  In phase 2, shocks were discontinued, and three intermediate-sized rings were added to the series and presented in increasing size (ie, 1 cm, 5 cm, 10 cm, 15 cm, 20 cm) while the participants' startle response to each ring was measured.  This was repeated for 10 trials.
ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3932061/
-Before Sarah sought therapy, her cleaning rituals acted as:

A) positive reinforcement.
B) negative reinforcement.
C) positive punishment.
D) negative punishment.

Correct Answer:

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