Author: Peyton Gilmartin

Firstly, the topic I chose to talk about is taste aversion. The concept of taste aversion is that humans are more apt to have an aversion to food if they become sick afterward even if they have no relation at all. Moreover, the effect can even happen in a single trail. If one feels sick hours after eating, the association is still made. Furthermore, this concept is a common trait that humans have in their lives. If someone eats something and then becomes ill afterward, they will form an association between the food and illness. This results in a protective attitude that your body generates and causes you to reject the food. Not only is the concept likely in humans, but animals develop it as well. Consequently, farmers use it to control predators. For example, if a wolf is hunting a sheep and you put a substance on the sheep to make the wolf nauseous, when the wolf tries to eat the sheep, it will associate the sheep with the feeling of being nauseous. The outcome of this is to protect farm animals and sway the wolves away from hunting them. The temptation to eat something one loves can diminish immensely when this conditioning happens. 

Secondly, I have experienced taste aversion before and I still can’t get over it even when I know it’s psychological. When I was a kid, my mom made me shrimp scampi. I used to love the dish so much; however, when she made it this time, I ended up getting extremely nauseous a couple hours afterward. I had to lay in bed for the rest of my night but couldn’t fall asleep due to the height of stomach pain I was in. Ever since that day, I can not eat, smell, or think about anything that has to do with shrimp. On the contrary, I know that this nausea could have been a result of many things and not just the shrimp that my mom made me that night. However, I still can not seem to get myself to eat it again. This experience is a clear representation of taste aversion and how it has affected my life directly. I put a negative spin on the shrimp she had cooked for me and made this assumption that the nausea was associated with the shrimp.

The concept that I chose to talk about is the Operant Conditioning experiment. This theory is focused on the concept of training someone or something to modify behavior with punishments and rewards. American psychologist, Burrhus Frederuc Skinner, carried out the experiment with what’s known as the “Skinner Box”. Skinner put lab rats in a box with two colored lights and a lever. This experiment solely focused on positive/negative reinforcement and punishment. The lab was set up with two different colored lights (red and green), a loudspeaker, and a lever that would do different things depending on what color the light was. Positive reinforcement is something pleasant being rewarded with a certain behavior. An example of this would be the rats hitting the lever as the green light is being displayed. Then, the food pellets would be released. Nextly, negative reinforcement is removing something negative when bad behavior is corrected. For example, loud music would sound in the box and the rat had to press the lever in order to turn it off. Lastly, punishment is applying something aversive after a specific behavior is demonstrated. An example of this would be the rats pressing the lever as the red light was on resulting in the rats experiencing a mild shock. In the end, the rats quickly understood the concept of the lights and learned to avoid the lever when the red light was on. 

Not only can operant conditioning be used on animals, but parents use this method to teach their children manners. During the summer of 2020, I took on a job of being a nanny. She was a five year old girl, named Piper, who was struggling with developing good manners and obsessed with Nutella, a chocolate hazelnut spread. Before taking on the job, Piper’s mom and I had a conversation about Piper’s manners and we came up with a way of trying to teach her. Every time I asked Piper to do something, whether it was her mom or I asking, she would get a spoonful of nutella if she did the task without fighting back about it. Not only did she stop talking back to her family, but before she would act on things, she would think deeply about what she was going to say/do before doing them. As the summer came to an end and Piper didn’t need a nanny, her actions and manners had improved immensely from when I met her. Giving Piper a spoonful of nutella was asserting positive reinforcement into her daily routine. The operant conditioning theory is a great way to teach children, animals, and even some adults the right and wrong way to handle things.