Aversion

Meaning of Aversion

The Latin word aversion came to Spanish as aversion. The concept refers to the dislike, disgust or rejection that one feels towards something or someone. For example: “I have an aversion to spiders: just think about them to make my skin crawl”, “The government has an aversion to independent journalists”, “Manuel never wants to formalize his sentimental ties because he has an aversion to commitment.

Dislike can be understood as resistance or objection. A person may say that he experiences an aversion to rudeness. This means that when you hear a bad word (or expletive), or when you notice rude behavior, you get in a bad mood.

The first impulse that arises before the stimulus that produces aversion is to move away from it, be it a thing, a situation or a person. Depending on the case, violent attitudes may appear against them, and this can have consequences of varying severity, especially if the damage is received by a living being.

A food can also provoke aversion. As expressed in the previous paragraph, the rejection that characterizes this sensation leads us to move away from the negative stimulus, and in a case of this type the most natural solution is to expel food from the body.

In technical terms, we can say that aversion is a primary emotion, that is, one of the complex and automatic affective states that we cannot control and that help us to adapt to the environment, since they favor our reaction mechanism to stimuli. Other primary emotions are disgust, fear, love, sadness, and anger. In this context, some believe that aversion is the foundation of certain feelings, such as hatred and apathy.

Those who have an aversion to flights, for their part, try not to travel by plane or helicopter because of the unpleasant sensations they suffer in the air. Flying causes fear, uncertainty and anxiety, and even causes physical discomfort. That is why the subject with aversion to flights prefers to travel by land or water.

It is known as aversion therapy to psychological or psychiatric treatment that aims to overcome an unwanted behavior by exposing the patient to the stimulus that triggers it and getting him to associate it with an unpleasant feeling. Depending on the problem to be solved, aversion can be achieved in different ways; for example, to fight against alcoholism, alcohol can be mixed with emetic substances (which cause vomiting).

In the field of economics, the notion of risk aversion is used to refer to a type of behavior adopted by investors and consumers. The idea refers to the individual who chooses the offer that has a lower risk even when another offer with greater risk could give him a more important return or benefit.

Risk aversion can be found beyond the economic plane, since it is related to the psychology of people. A risk-averse person may choose to stay in a low-paying job with poor working conditions rather than quit to try to find a better job.

This concept can be understood through the expression better known bad than good to know, which is used to describe the decision of the person who, out of fear of change, prefers to remain in their current situation, with the people around them, with their belongings. and everything that characterizes it so far. While nothing assures us that the unknown is more appropriate than the known, we are likely to improve if we keep moving.

Aversion

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