Taste Aversion

I feel that it is safe to say that every person has a food or drink that they disgust because of the way you felt while consuming it or afterwards.  This phenomenon is called taste aversion, avoiding a food or drink because it called you to become ill, and it is one that more scientific than many people may realize.  It is easy to think that someone will avoid a food because it makes them sick, but there is even a more complex psychological reasoning behind avoiding the taste.
If you are eating your favorite food and then you become sick from eating it there is a psychological force that causes you to avoid eating it again for at least a short period of time.  Your favorite food becomes associated with a negative feeling of being sick.  This example of classical conditioning is something that becomes an associative cause and effect reaction of eating your favorite food and feeling ill.

A famous example of this classical conditioning was an experiment done by two psychologists, John Garcia and Robert Koelling where they studied taste aversion in rats with regards to radiation levels and rats.  The rats were given sweetened water with low, medium, and high levels of radiation which made them sick.  The rats learned to associate sweetened water with illness and eventually refused to drink the sweet water.

Taste aversion is a positive evolutional purpose that has aided humans in survival.  Although less important for many modern day humans it has been vital to survival in earlier times.  Today if you eat Kraft Macaroni and Cheese and become sick and do not eat it again because you became sick it is an example of taste aversion, but it is not a survival technique since you will most likely not become deathly ill from the boxed macaroni and cheese.

 

Citation:  http://education-portal.com/academy/lesson/taste-aversion-definition-conditioning-learning.html#lesson

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