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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 the operant conditioning literature. While both techniques involve the onset of an aversive stimulus following the performance of some behavior, in the case of aversive conditioning, the therapist does not directly modify the client's instrumental behavior by simply providing punishment. Rather, some aspect of the stimulus is paired with aversive sensations such that the resulting emotional state inhibits the instrumental behavior. Referring to the above examples, the allure of the taste of a certain food, or the image of children, is modified as a result of becoming associated with illness or shock, respectively.

Aversive conditioning is sometimes referred to as counterconditioning. That is because the response one makes to a stimulus is reversed, or “countered,” as a result of a subsequent pairing. That is, via a process of classical conditioning, a stimulus that initially elicits approach behavior may come to elicit withdrawal. In a classic example, a child who originally approached small furry animals became fearful and avoidant of them as a result of their being repeatedly paired with an aversive noise. When used clinically, the goal of aversive conditioning is to establish (through classical conditioning) an emotional state that will inhibit or counter the initial response.

Research Basis

Aversive conditioning derives from laboratory studies in classical conditioning dating back to Pavlov. The most fundamental empirical base for aversive conditioning concerns research on food aversion. This research illustrates several important parameters of aversive conditioning. For instance, the pairing of food and illness may result in subsequent avoidance of the food even if the onset of illness is delayed by several hours. On the other hand, the pairing procedure is ineffective if stimuli such as sounds or lights are substituted for food. Therefore, animals appear to have a biological preparedness to respond to pairings between illness and the taste or smell of stimuli, but not between illness and the sight or sound of stimuli. Consistent with these laboratory findings, the clinical effectiveness of aversive conditioning procedures depends, in part, on the relevance or belongingness between the conditioned stimulus (e.g., food or shock) and the unconditioned stimulus (e.g., illness).

In addition to being grounded in basic laboratory research, aversive conditioning also has an applied legacy. As will be discussed in the following section, aversive conditioning is a procedure that has been utilized in an attempt to reduce a wide range of undesired behaviors in both adults and children. The procedure has proved to be more effective for certain child-specific problems such as thumb-sucking and bed-wetting, and less effective for many adult-specific problems such as addictive and fetishistic behavior. With respect to adults, the results of early studies were frequently interpreted as supportive of the effectiveness of aversive conditioning procedures. However, longer-term follow-up studies often proved less encouraging. Those studies illustrated that the behavior changes resulting from aversive conditioning procedures in adults frequently do not generalize to nontraining settings and are short-lived when they do. Enthusiasm for aversive conditioning has also been reduced due to ethical concerns about deliberately exposing individuals to aversive stimuli.

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