aversive conditioning
- noun
- /əˈvɜrsɪv kənˈdɪʃənɪŋ/
- Specialized
:
condicionamiento aversivo
- In psychology, aversive conditioning is often used to discourage unwanted behaviors by introducing unpleasant stimuli.
Examples
-
They identified the more intrusive and aversive procedures as nontraditional punishment, which ranges from time-out exclusion to aversive conditioning.
Academic text (1992) -
Therapists sometimes employ aversive conditioning to help patients overcome harmful habits through negative reinforcement.
-
During training, aversive conditioning may involve using mild shocks to prevent dogs from barking excessively.
Synonyms
3
7.7
A treatment that uses unpleasant experiences to stop unwanted habits like addiction
Antonyms
How Aversive
- Specialized
- Specialized
1
5.1
- Specialized
1
3.9
Surface Forms
Morphology
The meaning 'a learning process using unpleasant stimuli' is directly and transparently derived from 'aversive' (causing avoidance/discomfort) modifying 'conditioning' (learning by stimulus association). This adjectival+noun composition follows normal compositional patterns and is cross-linguistically straightforward, so a B1 learner who knows both constituents should be able to infer the MWE meaning.
Etymology
Aversive conditioning comes from the idea of training: the word aversive means unpleasant and conditioning means training, so someone gets something unpleasant, for example a bitter taste on their nails, each time they do the behavior. Because the bad feeling follows the action, people learn to avoid it, so the term means 'a learning process that reduces or stops a behavior by linking it to an unpleasant thing'.