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

Currently in the U.K., as in the U.S.A. 20 years ago, when students were as ked to name a food that they did not like, more dislike for the food was at tributed 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 M as first enquired about on a later occasi on, there was no evidence for a unique role for a causal association with n ausea in the human acquisition of food aversions. Furthermore, fear of the symptom was more prevalent than acquired sensory aversion when there was mo re precise recall of memories of the food being followed by nausea or vomit ing and greater likelihood of there having been causal contingency rather t han mere coincidence. Therefore, the more frequent invocation of nausea tha n of some other symptoms as the cause of a sensory aversion to a food may r esult frost personal theory of the body, rather than from a veridically rec alled occasion when nausea was contingent on eating the food-an event that must occur for aversion to arise from associative conditioning. (C) 2001 Ac ademic Press.