What You Can Change _. And What You Can't - Martin E. Seligman [35]
6
Phobias
BEFORE I DISCUSS PHOBIAS, I must lay the groundwork for the role of evolution in what we can change about ourselves. Some of what resists change does so because it was an adaptive trait for our ancestors and is the product of natural selection. Phobias, and much else in our emotional lives, are like this.
The sauce béarnaise phenomenon. Sauce béarnaise used to be my favorite sauce until one evening in 1966, when I had a delicious meal of filet mignon with sauce béarnaise. About midnight I became violently ill, retching until there was nothing left to throw up. After that, sauce béarnaise tasted awful to me; just thinking about it set my teeth on edge.
At the time, I was a fledgling learning theorist. I was familiar with Pavlovian conditioning, and this seemed like an instance. Pavlovian conditioning is, of course, the science of how we learn what signals what. A child hears a dog growl, but she is undisturbed. Then the dog bites her. After that, she is afraid whenever she sees a dog. She has learned, by Pavlovian conditioning, that growling signals hurt, and she is now afraid of dogs. How can this be explained?
Pavlov’s dogs, you will remember, first had the conditional1 stimulus (CS) of the sight of Pavlov paired with their unconditional response (UR) of salivating for the unconditional stimulus (US) of food. After half a dozen such pairings, they began to salivate just on seeing Pavlov. Salivating to Pavlov was the conditional response (CR). Pavlovian conditioning worked because the dogs associated the sight of Pavlov with the response of salivating to food.
Some events turn us off or turn us on the very first time we encounter them: Thunder is frightening the first time it happens; stroking of the genitals is exciting the first time it happens. Other events have to acquire their emotional significance. The emotional significance of the face of our mother or of the words “Your money or your life” must be learned. All of our emotional life that is not inborn might be Pavlovian conditioning. This idea had placed Pavlovian conditioning among the most exciting fields in all of psychology by the mid-1960s.
My sauce béarnaise aversion seemed to fit. The taste was the CS, and sickness was the UR. This pairing rendered future encounters with sauce béarnaise nauseating. At any rate, this was what I mused about over the next month.
What focused my musings was a remarkable paper published a month after this incident. John Garcia, a young radiation researcher, published an experiment with findings so anomalous that—once accepted—they revolutionized learning theory. So hard to swallow were these findings for learning theorists that the leading textbook writer in that field said at the time that they were no more likely to be true than that “you would find bird shit in a cuckoo clock”!2
Garcia was an obscure investigator studying radiation sickness in a government laboratory. He noticed that when his rats got sick, they went off their food. After they recovered, they still wouldn’t eat their old chow. Otherwise, though, they looked completely unperturbed. This was bewildering, but it also looked like Pavlovian conditioning, with the taste of the chow the CS, sickness the UR, and coming to hate their chow the CR. But if the rats were conditioned by being sick, why only a taste aversion? Why not a more widespread aversion—to their handlers, to lights going off, to doors opening, to everything else that occurred with their illness? Garcia was bewildered—for the same reason I was bewildered about sauce béarnaise.
Garcia then carried out a classic experiment, my candidate for the most significant experiment conducted during my lifetime in the psychology of learning:
Every time his rats licked at their drinking spouts, they tasted