Aversive Conditioning

Description of the Strategy

Aversive conditioning, also referred to as aversion therapy when applied in clinical settings, involves the systematic pairing of an aversive stimulus with some undesired behavior. For example, taste-aversion conditioning involves the pairing of food ingestion with the subsequent onset of nausea or sickness. As a result of the pairing, the food item is avoided in the future. Similarly, shock may be systematically paired with sexual arousal that arises from some prohibited stimulus (i.e., children), in the hopes that the fear elicited by the shock interferes with the original emotion and behavior elicited by the prohibited stimulus.

Aversive conditioning, a technique arising out of the classical conditioning literature, is typically distinguished from punishment, which is a technique arising out of ...