No unique role for nausea attributed to eating a food in the recalled acquisition of sensory aversion for that food

Abstract

Currently in the U.K., as in the U.S.A. 20 years ago, when students were asked to name a food that they did not like, more dislike for the food was attributed to nausea or vomiting after eating than to other gastrointestinal symptoms or to illness in other parts of the body. However, when members of the public first identified adverse symptoms and then attributed them to foods, and dislike for the food was first enquired about on a later occasion, there was no evidence for a unique role for a causal association with nausea in the human acquisition of food aversions. Furthermore, fear of the symptom was more prevalent than acquired sensory aversion when there was more precise recall of memories of the food being followed by nausea or vomiting and greater likelihood of there having been causal contingency rather than mere coincidence. Therefore, the more frequent invocation of nausea than of some other symptoms as the cause of a sensory aversion to a food may result from personal theory of the body, rather than from a veridically recalled occasion when nausea was contingent on eating the food---an event that must occur for aversion to arise from associative conditioning.