Whenever your mouth waters at the mention of chocolate, or you find yourself working harder after a few words of praise, you are demonstrating conditioned responses in the way you react to the world. Learning by simple association, or ‘conditioning,’ was once thought by psychologists to be the mechanism that explains most human behavior. Now, however, we know that human responses are more complex.
We may not feel that we have much in common with Ivan Pavlov’s dogs, which became conditioned to associate food with the sound of a bell. Still, we all have our learned responses to our environment that produce certain bodily reactions and behaviors. A lot of conditioning in humans happens unconsciously and involves aspects of memory that we can not verbally describe.
Conditioning through experience
Most people have had the experience of being sick after eating something unpleasant – perhaps a suspect mussel in a plate of moules mariniere or something fatty or green forced on them in childhood – and then had recurrent feelings of nausea when exposed to that food again. Humans, as well as other animals, can form a strong unconscious link between sensory characteristics, such as the smell and taste of a particular food, and the physical consequences of eating it – especially if that consequence is to feel sick, and the food has an unusual or novel flavor. The merest whiff of the offending food can bring back a wave of nausea that is almost impossible to overcome by conscious effort.
Now known as conditioned taste aversion, this kind of response probably developed in humanity’s early evolution as a way of avoiding eating foods such as berries and fungi that might be poisonous. The body and brain are so strongly ‘ programmed’ to respond in this ‘way that conditioned taste aversion can be triggered even when the about of illness has no actual connection to the food. This can have unforeseen consequences. For example, chemotherapy treatments tend to be followed by unpleasant attacks of nausea and sickness. After a number of treatments, some cancer patients begin to experience these symptoms simply by entering the treatment ment room. Children have sometimes been given ice cream to cheer them up before chemotherapy sessions – with the unfortunate result that they become conditioned to feel nauseous in response to ice – cream, and it ceases to be a treat.
Similarly, our emotional responses to things, people, and places are conditioned by previous experiences. After being stung by a wasp, someone might become fearful at the mere sight of a wasp or bee; conversely, if the sting was less painful than previously imagined, the experience might lessen the fear. Likewise, someone ·who has had painful dental treatment may begin to feel anxiety as soon as they set foot in a dental surgery, a response that can diminish if they find a dentist they trust. Anyone trying to give up smoking may have as much trouble trying to break free from the conditioned response of smoking in certain situations as they have beaten the physical addiction.
Unlearning learned responses
A common feature of depression is the belief that escape from misery or unhappiness is impossible. Such ‘learned helplessness is a conditioned response, developing from a succession of unpleasant events that seem unavoidable and uncontrollable. Experiences accumulate to produce a sense of defeat and passivity, even in situations that can, in fact, be dealt with. Children (and adults) can be affected by this type of conditioning in their education if minor learning failures are handled insensitively and produce the feeling that trying to learn is pointless. Similarly, people who are consistently discouraged by a spouse or partner – even in trivial issues such as parking a car correctly – may suffer recurrent feelings of helplessness, with consequences for physical as well as mental health. Cognitive behavioral therapy techniques reverse the effects of such conditioning by rewarding positive thinking and behavior and questioning the validity of defeatist thought patterns.
