In Chapters 3, 4, and 5, we addressed the role of frustrative and, generally, of disruptive factors in the acquisition and extinction of responses in a variety of experimental paradigms. The results of these experiments have been discussed in the context of a more general conceptualization of arousal, suppression, persistence, and regression: We have alluded to “generality” and “transfer” of persistence and, in the case of the theoretical and experimental treatment of the role of prediscrimination experience in subsequent discrimination learning, to “resistance to discrimination” as another form of transfer of persistence. In other versions of a discrimination learning experiment, the within-subjects PRF experiment and the DNC experiments, the “generalized PREE” and the emergence in extinction of ritualized behaviors have also reflected, or at least implied, transfer of persistence. If we now look back to the first chapter and to Table 1.2, we can regard Chapters 3, 4, and 5 as a detailed elaboration of the first two of the six steps in the psychobiological study of related behavior effects. I will now undertake a brief general discussion of the theory. This will focus on the breadth of experimental particulars the theory encompasses and will compare its scope with other theories with which it has some explanatory overlap.

In A Brief History of Time, Stephen Hawking (1988) writes the following: “A theory is a good theory if it satisfies two requirements: It must accurately describe a large class of observations on the basis of a model that contains only a few arbitrary elements, and it must make definite predictions about the results of future observations” (p. 9).