As early as I can remember, my house growing up was always free of bell peppers. My mother is allergic to them; even the smell makes her sick to her stomach. I always wondered if I was allergic to them as well, but never took any chances as a child and didn’t eat them either.
Even to this day when dining out with my parents my mother always asks “are there bell peppers in this” her face would always have that crinkled up nose, that look of disgust on her face when she says it, as would anyone who has a food allergy especially to a common food like bell peppers.From this experience I learned not to like bell peppers either, as a young a child develops that sense of acceptance he or she want to be just like them, my sister is exactly the same way about bell peppers. This experience was learned primarily without intention by classical conditioning.Classical Conditioning is process of behavior modification in which a subject learns to respond in a desired manner such that a neutral stimulus (the conditioned stimulus) is repeatedly presented in association with a stimulus (the unconditioned stimulus) that elicits a natural response (the unconditioned response) until the neutral stimulus alone elicits the same response (now called the conditioned response).
For example, in Pavlov's experiments, food is the unconditioned stimulus that produces salivation, a reflex or unconditioned response. The bell is the conditioned stimulus, which eventually produces salivation in the absence of food.This salivation is the conditioned response. (Free dictionary 2000) My learning experience is very similar to the experiments of Ivan Pavlov. The unconditioned stimulus is the bell pepper; however, because of my mother’s reactions to the bell pepper from such an early age the unconditioned response was never there for me.
I was always from day one conditioned to dislike the bell pepper by observing her reaction to bell peppers. Her reaction to the bell pepper taught me to also dislike them, weather I was allergic to the food or not this was the conditioned stimulus.This type of conditioning was not intentional, my mother never said to me that I shouldn’t eat them, however, she made it very clear that they were disgusting, and as a child learns to like and dislike a great deal of the same things that your parents do with-out realizing that it was a conditioned “like” or “dislike” for one thing or the other. As for the conditioned response, as a child I witnessed my mother getting sick from eating foods with bell pepper in them, and she was nauseated and sick immediately, from this response it helped to reinforce the classical conditioning of hating bell peppers.
I can look back and take a long look at the things I like and the things that I dislike, whether it is a food a color or even a certain smell I can trace that back to a classical conditioning experience with my mother. My parents were divorced when I was very young and lived with my mother all my younger life. I can now see by observing the types of dislikes and likes that my father has versus the likes and dislikes that I have and I know immediately that it was a conditioned learning experiences set forth by my mother.As part of another example, my father loves sour kraut on his hot dogs, I have never had sour kraut until recently and always made a face or said no to having it in the past, because I was told that it was disgusting by my mother, her conditioned response ingrained in me not to like it just like she had with the bell pepper, even though she didn’t have an unconditioned response to the sour kraut such as nausea or sickness to the food.
Once I ate the hotdog with the sour kraut I noticed that I did like the sour kraut on the hotdog. Classical conditioning is unavoidable unless you keep the blank slate you have as a baby by avoiding all contact with the outside environment, it’s not only the parents that influence children into classical conditioning, any repeated of conditioned responses or conditioned stimulus will help to define a like or dislike of any one thing.The examples of the bell pepper and sour kraut are just a couple of the examples of classical conditioning set by my immediate environment, as an adult now those types of classical conditioning are further and few between, my environment is limited to those around me on a repeated basis. I now unconscientiously can decide for myself what I like or dislike by my own free will and limiting a conditioned response.
