Ashley Fay (925149402)
Psych 100 Extra Credit Blog Comment
Taste aversions occur both consciously and unconsciously. These are a type of psychological condition that occurs quite frequently in childhood, but also occur in later stages of life. It is a learned behavior that can either be due to a particular food or to an incident that occurred simultaneously with the exposure to a particular food.
It is developed when an individual makes an association with a food. This aversion created is a negative association, meaning the something bad and uncomfortable happened to him or her when they were exposed to and ate the food. For example, when I was growing up I ate a turkey hoagie from Wawa, only to become violently sick from it later in the night. For quite some time and till this day I have avoided deli turkey or anything type of hoagie with deli meat. Upon the sight or smell of one I would become queasy and nauseous. Looking back, I now realize that my sickness was not induced by the hoagie but that I had had dairy earlier and forgot to take my lactaid pills, which led to my nauseous reaction and sickness due to my lactose intolerance.
Another example is when I tried green apple Smirnoff for the first time. I immediately got sick from drinking only a little bit of it. Upon that experience I avoided another flavored green apple and even avoided green apples themselves. I soon realized that my sickness was not due to the intake of the vodka but to a stomach bug that I picked up from my best friend when visiting her at college for her birthday. Even though I have came to this realization, I still avoid it till this day.
This idea that the brain can easily cause conditioning to occur after just a single pairing of the neural stimulus with the unconditioned stimulus and result in a conditioned response.