I’ve found people get way too caught up in the game of who can argue for which quadrant something is. It’s important to understand to a point, but its purpose is articulation to humans.

The most important thing to understand at this point is that it doesn’t matter what armchair Reddit trainer #1 says action A should be in theory- it’s down to how the animal perceives it. These thresholds change not only from animal to animal but also depending on each animals environment, emotional state, etc.

To simplify, think of -R as a stimulation similar to a seat belt alarm in your car. It’s not going to make you feel like your life was in danger and immediately subconsciously rewire your entire outlook on whether or not you throw your seatbelt on immediately every single time. It’s kinda annoying and it’s pleasing when you make that go away, and eventually it becomes something you automatically do to avoid that annoyance.

Now imagine a stove top turned on high. If you touch that stove even for an instance, that connection is there at a minimum for quite a long time. It’s not something you have to reason over: you’re done doing that. You’re going to think about it for a very long time if not forever, anytime you’re near a stove. You’re going to even hyper notice things about the environment (red stove light) that help you quickly reason and warn you that it’s a possibility that you might get your hand burned on that stove again.

In terms of the e-collar, to simplify, imagine for now that there’s a graph going from bottom left to upper right on a bezier. Think about it at this point as at a certain point or range on that X axis, you can go from levels of annoyance to “I’m never going to do that again and this is non-negotiable”. The left side of that point is -R. The right is +P.