Learning 185The next time you watch television, watch the commercials closely. Advertisers often
use certain objects or certain types of people in their ads to generate a specific emotional
response in viewers, hoping that the emotional response will become associated with their
product. Sexy models, cute little babies, and adorable puppies are some of the examples of
stimuli the advertising world uses to tug at our heartstrings, so to speak. But advertisers
also use vicarious classical conditioning, often showing people reacting emotionally in the
ad (either positively or negatively) to a product. They hope that the viewer will become con-
ditioned to experience that same emotion when seeing the same product on store shelves.
The good news is that the same learning principles that can contribute to pho-
bias and anxiety disorders can also be used to treat them, as we’ll see in the video Using
Classical Conditioning to Treat Disorders.
CONDITIONED TASTE AVERSIONS Some kinds of associations in classical conditioning
seem to be easier to make than others. For example, are there any foods that you just
can’t eat anymore because of a bad experience with them? Believe it or not, your reac-
tion to that food is a kind of classical conditioning.
Many experiments have shown that laboratory rats will develop a conditioned taste
aversion for any liquid or food they swallow up to 6 hours before becoming nauseated.
Researchers (Garcia et al., 1989; Garcia & Koelling, 1966) found that rats that were given a
sweetened liquid and then injected with a drug or exposed to radiation* that caused nau-
sea would not touch the liquid again. In a similar manner, alcoholics who are given a drug
to make them violently nauseated when they drink alcohol may learn to avoid drinking
any alcoholic beverage. The chemotherapy drugs that cancer patients receive also can cre-
ate severe nausea, which causes those people to develop a taste aversion for any food they
have eaten before going in for the chemotherapy treatment ( Berteretche et al., 2004).
But I thought that it took several pairings of these stimuli to bring
about conditioning. How can classical conditioning happen so fast?It’s interesting to note that birds, which find their food by sight, will avoid any
object or insect that simply looks like the one that made them sick. There is a certain
species of moth with coloring that mimics the monarch butterfly. That particular
CCWatch the Video Using Classical Conditioning to Treat Disordersconditioned taste aversion
development of a nausea or aversive
response to a particular taste because
that taste was followed by a nausea
reaction, occurring after only one
*radiation: beams of electromagnetic energy. association.