Taste aversion, initially discovered by Dr. John Garcia, is a form of conditioning where the subject associates the taste of a certain food with symptoms caused by a toxic, spoiled, or poisonous substance. In other words, when an animal eats something that makes it sick, it is less likely to want to eat it again. This phenomenon has been vital in helping humans and animals stay alive by avoiding food in our environment that may make us sick. Taste aversion has been applied in the modern world, typically used to prevent predators from eating a certain prey or crop. For example, if the population of mice in an area is too low due to predators, you could spray several dead mice with chemicals that cause illness when ingested. When the cat gets sick from eating the chemically treated mouse, it will be less likely to want to eat mice anymore.

I personally have experienced taste aversion in my life on multiple occasions. When I was in kindergarten, I was with my family making cupcakes to bring to school for my birthday. At the time, candy corn was one of my favorite treats. For this reason, my aunt and I were putting one piece of candy corn on top of each cupcake. This meant that there was a container of candy corn out, which I had full access to. As any kid that age would, I gorged myself, eating as much as I could. My mom tried to tell me that I was going to make myself sick, but I insisted on eating more. My aunt backed me up, saying it was my birthday and to just let me have fun with it. With her blessing, I continued to stuff myself full of candy. Several hours later, I began to face the consequences of my decision. I awoke in the middle of the night with a screaming stomachache, and proceeded to spend half of the night puking my brains out. From that point on I could not bear the thought of eating a piece of candy corn. When I brought the cupcakes to school the next day, I pulled my piece off the top of the cupcake and threw it out because it was so unappealing. I ended up going the next twelve years of my life without eating another piece of candy corn, until the end of my senior year of high school.

Like every other good good owner, when my family first got our dog we were very excited to teach her all the cool tricks that we saw most other dogs doing. We used the technique learned in class called shaping to use positive reinforcers like toys and food to get our dog to do our desired behaviors. We taught her how to sit, lay down, shake, bark on command, and balance treats on her nose. We showed her what we wanted her to do, and rewarded her with treats or her favorite toys when she did them on her own. She quickly learned that she could be living the good life and get treats only by performing these actions. No action = no treats. Another “trick” we taught her was that if she went outside when nature called, she would often get a small treat upon coming back into the house. Through most of her life she has been able to do these simple things and get rewarded.

Until she figured a way around our system. As she got older, she began to not really want to put in the work to get the extra food outside of her regular mealtime. She knew that my mom was a sucker for her and almost never would refuse her treats when she did the good actions we taught her all her life. My dog then began to get my mom to let her outside, stand around for a few minutes, then get let back inside. After this short trip outside she would run to the place we keep her treats and look at my mom expectantly. And It worked. Now I’m not entirely sure if my dog is a psychological genius who figured out how to cheat the system, or if she is barely grasping the concept that we want to reward her for not “going” in the house. Either way, it’s working out pretty well for her.

Anxiety is a common disorder within humans. For the most part almost everyone experiences anxiety during their lives, for example before a speech or large sporting event. However, when does normal anxiety cross over to abnormal anxiety. The three D’s, deviant, distressful, and dysfunctional are used to classify anxiety disorders.

My cousin can be classified with a anxiety disorder. He is deviant as he does not like social interaction and will go to measures to stay away from people, he also has a constant supply of hand sanitizer o him at all times and uses it whenever shaking hands touching door knob etc. This can lead to distress as he can not control himself in these situations. Other people also tend to avoid him due to his constant distress.   He can also be considered dysfunctional due to his constant hand washing and fear of germs. He cannot go through a day or a class without thinking about germs and thinking about washing his hands.  This can be hard for not only himself but his family and all of us as well.

Panic Disorders are more common in people then you would imagine. According to the National Institute of Public Health there are 6 million American adults aged 18 and older who have this affliction.

Personally, in my life the experience I have with it is through my mom who has a panic disorder and has panic attacks. The first one that I remember her having I was 11 years old and my mom was in the living room crying and writhing on the floor because she thought she was having a heart attack. She kept grabbing her chest and telling me to call 911. My baby brother, who was 1 at the time, was crying, my dad was at work, and my mom was breathing heavily and telling me that she was dying. I froze. I didn’t know what to do, I had no idea what was going on or that she even had these panic attacks. So I called 911 and we all went to the ER where I sat with my brother in the waiting room while I waited to see what was wrong. It was probably the longest 30 minutes of my life sitting there in that ER trying to calm my brother down and wondering how I could get ahold of my dad, when the doctor came out. He sat down next to me and told me that my mom was fine and that they’re doing tests because she insisted but that we could go home. I didn’t understand. I saw her and the pain she felt not even 30 minutes ago and she looked so scared, she was crying, she couldn’t even get up off the floor, and the doctor said that she was perfectly fine?

I didn’t understand what my mom had for a few years, though they ket happening. But we didn’t have to go to the ER anymore and it was never as bad as it was that one instance. So learning more about Panic Disorders really helps to show exactly why that happened to my mom. She had all the symptoms that we discussed, shortness of breath, feelings of terror, chest pains, the feeling that you’re having a heart attack. It must be terrifying to go through that so that fact that she lives with it every day shows how strong of a person you can be. I admire my mom for being able to go through her day to day and not let it affect her life in a big way. Knowing that there are so many who suffer this disorder I hope they are able to get the help that my mom was able to so that they can live generally normal lives.

http://www.nimh.nih.gov/health/publications/the-numbers-count-mental-disorders-in-america/index.shtml#Panic

Negative punishment is taking away a desirable stimulus following a behavior in order to reduce the likelihood that the behavior will occur again in the future. A stimulus is taken away in order to decrease future responses. The bad behavior can be anything from hitting someone to stealing something. But an unrelated or related positive stimulus is taken away as a result.  This has proven to be very effective, especially in children.

This occurs mostly in children in their younger years. An example is when siblings are fighting over a game and who gets to play first. In conclusions the parents take away the game all together.The behavior is how the siblings are acting. The stimulus that is taken away is the game.  Another example is when a student is acting out in class the teacher may take away recess privileges. The behavior is acting out in class. The stimulus is recess.

My personal experience with negative punishment happened in 5th grade.  I did not want to go to mass one sunday. This Sunday was about one week before Halloween. Since I fought going to mass my privilege to go trick or treating was taken away. I was suppose to go to my friends neighborhood and trick or treat with a big group of people from my grade school.  My family is very religious so not going to mass one Sunday was very bad behavior.  I then went to mass every Sunday until I came to college when I could make my own religious decisions. The behaviors was disobeying my parents orders to go to mass. The stimulus was trick or treating.

Negative punishment along with positive punishment is very effective. In addition negative reinforcement and positive reinforcement are effective too.  These are ways to teach people to obey and follow rules used in various ways.

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

Many dog owners have a desire to teach their dogs new tricks, but are not aware of the best technique is to use. Using reinforcers to guide behavior closer towards a desired behavior is called shaping. Dog treats, toys, and playtime are always great incentives to use. Many dog owners succeed in training their pet by employing shaping. Shaping combines the uses of positive reinforcement and punishment in order to teach an animal to perform certain behaviors. Animals can be taught to respond to more than just commands, such as discriminating between many types of objects and events. Shaping is a form of operant conditioning as it teaches an animal to do a certain behavior.
My family and I got a puppy two years ago. She is very active and has a lot of energy. In order to have fun with her, my sisters and I decided we wanted to train her to do desired behaviors. We used shaping to complete our goal of having our puppy learn to sit, lay down, roll over, and give a high five. With dedication, time, and hard work, we were successful in training our puppy to do unnatural tricks. When using the technique of shaping to train an animal, one has to go through small, sequential steps must be followed through. The first step we used was to gave our puppy a treat every time she sat when we commanded her to. Then we gave her a treat every time she laid down, and finally when she rolled over. Going through each step helps the animal progressively learn to do more complicated tricks and is called successive approximations. By praising and rewarding our puppy when she performed the desired behavior, she learned that if she sit, laid down, or rolled over, she will get a treat. Shaping is most successful when done in small steps and is a proven way to teach animals desired behaviors.

I am familiar with psychological disorders all to well as I was at one point diagnosed with a Depressive Disorder and Bipolar when I was 14, and a warning of schizophrenia for later. I never took medication and briefly did therapy until I ultimately decided enough was enough and here I am now, fully functional and such. However I wonder how life would be if I or anyone else was never told of these “disorders”. I mean by this that if someone never told me I was “depressed” would I jump to that conclusion every time I’m sad or disinterested? Does knowing there is something wrong make excuses easier and “not our fault”? The growing amount of people diagnosed with disorders makes me believe its something in our minds- overly diagnosed. Now yes there are many people who truly have a disorder but is it fair to lump every disinterested or sad or mood swinging person into a group? If you’re told there is something wrong with you mentally, you can’t change it, chances are you just developed a
“get out of jail free card” with every decision or action you make. I’ve done it with depression and Bipolar when in reality I believe I have neither, but it makes a hell of a case and you get away with much more. I cant help but to think one day someone will diagnose me with schizophrenia, as my uncle has, and with learning about it in class I can see how some of my actions may lean towards it. Or, is it because I learned of the actions, and of schizophrenia that I think I will develop it whereas if I never heard of it, the thoughts, the behaviors, the anything would still be “normal”, I would be normal.

My point is, there are real disorders and then I believe there is the ability to create a disorder through knowledge of it- its real, you actually feel and are those things but I think we cant trick ourselves into it- or trick a psychiatrist into thinking it with all the information out there available to ourselves. I convinced numerous doctors that I had Bipolar and if that were the case, I would not be functioning at this time. I know for a fact I fed them false information to freak out my parents, to gain an “excuse” for an action I had done. It wasn’t real. But anytime my mood swings and I’m probably just being a B*@$# I blame Bipolar. I use it as an excuse where as I know very well I created it with my own mind and caused everyone around to believe.

Operant conditioning is a type of learning in which associations are formed between behaviors and resulting events. This kind of conditioning is most often used to train animals to do behaviors that are unnatural for them. Operant conditioning uses reinforcers and punishments to shape behavior towards a desired behavior. Reinforcers guide behavior with steps called successive approximations. There are both positive and negative reinforcers, though these do not mean good or bad. A positive reinforcer increases behavior by presenting positive stimuli, while a negative reinforcer increases behavior by removing negative stimuli. Punishment does the opposite of a reinforcer, decreasing a behavior with an aversive event.

There have been some famous experiments involving operant conditioning, including Thorndike’s Experiment and the Skinner Box experiment.

Edward Thorndike’s work regarding learning theory is known for leading to the development of operant conditioning and behaviorism. He led an experiment using cats and a puzzle box. Simply, the cats had to figure out how to get out of the box in order to get fish that was on the outside of the box. The cats were put back in the box repeatedly once they stumbled across the lever that opened the box. Eventually, Thorndike observed that the time it took the cats to escape was decreasing; they were finding the lever much quicker. Thorndike concluded that rewarded behavior (getting out of the puzzle box and getting fish) is likely to recur.

B. F. Skinner elaborated more on Thorndike’s findings, developing his own Skinner Box. Skinner used pigeons and rats in his experiments. A rat would be in the box and if the rat did what Skinner wanted it to do, then it would be rewarded with food. If the rat did not perform how Skinner wanted, then it received an electric shock. These procedures were repeated until eventually the rats did almost exactly what was asked of them.

Having a thorough understanding of operant conditioning can help considerably when training animals. My family has trained my dog to tell us when he wants to go outside on our back deck using this theory of learning. Most people attribute dog training to classical conditioning because of Pavlov’s Dogs, but dogs are usually trained with operant conditioning. With my dog, we taught him to ring a set of bells that are hanging from the handle whenever he wants outside. To do this, we started ringing the bells ourselves whenever we let him outside to allow him to associate the bells with the opening of the door. Then we started to let him try to ring the bells. If he rang them, then he got to go outside (positive reinforcer). But if he did not ring them he did not get to go outside (negative reinforcer). He eventually caught on and learned that ringing the bells means he can go outside. We also taught him to sit before he could be let back inside, and we did it in the same way. If he sat, he got what he wanted and came inside. If he did not sit, then he was stuck outside until he did. We taught him this hoping that it would get him to stop jumping on the door when he wanted inside, but as he is a very energetic dog, it only works some of the time.

McLeod, S. A. (2007). Edward Thorndike. Retrieved from http://www.simplypsychology.org/edward-thorndike.html

McLeod, S. A. (2007). Skinner – Operant Conditioning. Retrieved from http://www.simplypsychology.org/operant-conditioning.html

Social Anxiety can be very misunderstood in today’s society. I believe that Social Anxiety is one of those disorders that can’t be fully understood unless you’ve experienced some of the symptoms yourself at some point in time. Social anxiety is marked by one having an overwhelming sense of worry and self-consciousness about everyday social situations. Most people with this disorder have fears centered around if their actions will cause them embarrassment or not. Sometimes these fears can go above and beyond and cause panic attacks related to social interactions.
I happen to have a friend from high school with this disorder, and from my experiences dealing with her I feel I’ve grown to know the disorder better than most average students. For the sake of anonymity let’s call this friend “Sue”. I met Sue in the ninth grade, but it probably took me until about half way through the year to become friends with her. I honestly had no idea she had this disorder for the longest time. One day we decided to go to the mall and she found a top she really liked, but it was a size too big. I told her to just go up to the desk and ask if they had one in a smaller size, but she kept saying no, and asked if we could just look around for it. We looked for about thirty minutes, and at that point I was getting annoyed and was badgering her to just ask the sales clerk. At that point we were in a back corner of the store and she literally just broke down and began sobbing and saying she couldn’t ask the sales clerk, it was just too much, and she would think she was stupid for asking. After this incident we went back to her house and her mother and her explained her condition to me.
She had, had a panic attack in the mall because she was really that afraid of talking to the sales clerk. It turns out she had been diagnosed with this disorder in the seventh grade. She has an incredible fear of talking to people she doesn’t know and most situations she needs to bring people she’s comfortable with her to talk to someone so she can have the support. Her treatment includes therapy (which has more effect now that she’s comfortable with her therapist) and some medications.
Social Anxiety isn’t understood by a lot of people, many tend to just tell those suffering with it to “get over themselves” and talk to whoever it is they need to. This same friend recently started college, and has a roommate who does not understand the disorder. Her roommate constantly tells her to get out of her room and hang out with people because “it’s getting ridiculous”. But Sue’s fear of meeting new people is really that intense, I’ve witnessed firsthand how bad it can get.