基本情况
青年
青年时期当过农业工人、技工和士兵。他于 1943 年结婚，有三个孩子。1948 年获加利福尼亚大学伯克利分校心理学学士学位，1949 年获硕士学位。他曾协助 E.托尔曼工作，1965 年获心理学哲学博士学位，与 D.克雷奇和 B.F.里奇一起工作。
中年
1949~1951 年他曾任加利福尼亚大学伯克利分校心理学助理教授，1951 1958 年在旧金山作为一名心理学家在美国海军辐射防护实验室工作，在这里研究大脑对电离辐射的反应。次年，他在奥克兰公立学校任生物系主任。1959~1965 年，他任长滩加利福尼亚州立大学心理学助理教授，在此期间，他还在长滩退伍军人管理局医院任神经科生理科顾问一职。1965~1968 年，他作为生物学家在马萨诸塞州综合医院神经外科任职，同时兼任哈佛大学医学院兼职讲师。1968 1971 年他来到纽约，任纽约州立大学石溪市分校心理学教授，1971 年为该校心理学系主任。从 1973 年开始，他在加利福尼亚大学洛杉矶分校任心理学和精神病学教授至 1997 年退休。
研究方向
加西亚以其在味觉 – 厌恶经典条件反射方面的研究（大鼠在内脏性有害刺激的作用下，对食物的嗅觉或味觉刺激形成长延迟的厌恶条件反应）、选择性适应性学习心理机制以及条件性反感引起的掠夺行为矫正的研究而著名。他强调学习心理机制的进化起源，用生态学及神经学术语表述其见解。他是第一个在实验室中证明味觉 – 厌恶学习的心理学家，证明了动物具有学习某些联结的生物学准备，而且一些 CS-UCS 结合在特定物种上可以经典条件化，而其他的则不能。
获奖情况
他曾获得过美国实验心理学家协会授予的 H.沃伦奖章和 PBK 联谊会名誉会员资格，1979 年获美国心理学会颁发的杰出科学贡献奖，1983 年当选为国家科学院院士，他还曾担任美国西部心理学会主席。
英文版：
John Garcia (psychologist)
John Garcia (June 12, 1917 – October 12, 2012) was an American psychologist, most known for his research on taste aversion. Garcia studied at the University of California-Berkeley, where he received his A.B., M.A., and Ph.D. degrees in 1955 in his late forties. At his death, he was professor emeritus at University of California, Los Angeles. Previously, he was an assistant professor at California State University at Long Beach, a lecturer in the Department of Surgery at Harvard Medical School, professor and chairman of the Psychology Department at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, and Professor of Psychology at the University of Utah. A Review of General Psychology survey, published in 2002, ranked Garcia as the 88th most cited psychologist of the 20th century, tied with James J. Gibson, David Rumelhart, Louis Leon Thurstone, Margaret Floy Washburn, and Robert S. Woodworth.
Early life
Garcia was born to a farm family on June 12, 1917, near Santa Rosa, California, and died a world-renowned member of the National Academy of Sciences on October 12, 2012. He was a farmer, a cartoonist, a ship fitter, an Air Corps Cadet, an amateur boxer, a high school teacher and a college professor, as well as a research scientist at Harvard Medical School and the Brain Research Institute at UCLA. During World War II he built submarines for the US Navy, and then enlisted in the Army Air Corps.
Garcia was a first-generation American, the son of Spanish immigrants: Sara Casasnovas y Unamuno and Benigno Garcia y Rodriguez. By age 20, he was working as a mechanic making 18-wheeler trucks. A few years later he solved the problem of installing mufflers onto submarines and consequently became a ship fitter. During World War II, he joined the United States Army Air Corps and became a pilot; after persistent nausea, he could no longer fly and he finished his term as an intelligence specialist. When demobilized, he used the G.I. Bill to pay for his college tuition. He attended Santa Rosa Junior College, where he achieved a bachelor’s degree. He then attended the University of California at Berkeley where he achieved a master’s degree and Ph.D.
In 1943, he married Dorothy Inez Robertson. In 1985, after he retired from UCLA, they moved to Skagit County, Washington.
After the war, Garcia used the G.I. Bill to go to UC Berkeley where he did radiation and brain research. Early on, he discovered that rats could detect and avoid low doses of radiation, lower than a dental x-ray. This led to sharp scientific battles with B.F. Skinner’s Behaviorist Psychology and pro-nuclear members of the military–industrial complex; a fight he eventually won. When sheep started dying en masse downwind from the nuclear test sites, it was members of his lab that identified the cause as radiation poisoning. He flew to Vienna with JFK to meet with the Russians; he testified before congress along with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
Through all this, he always thought of himself as a farm boy bringing real animals and real people into the cloistered world of academic debate; taking on not only the nuclear and scientific establishment, but also the IQ and SAT testers, and the bureaucratic inertia of the Environmental Protection Agency. He always insisted that science must conform to the real world, and the lives of ordinary people. His later work showed how taste aversion could be used to train wolves and coyotes, in the wild, not to prey on livestock. The “Garcia Theory” (of taste aversion) is named for him.
Research
Garcia’s first postdoctoral job was with the U.S. Naval Radiological Defense Lab in San Francisco, California in 1955. He began to study the reaction of the brain to ionizing radiation in a series of experiments on laboratory animals, mainly rats. Garcia noticed that rats avoided drinking water from plastic bottles when in radiation chambers. He suspected that the rats associated the “plastic tasting” water with the sickness that radiation triggers.
During the experiments rats were given one taste, sight, sound as a neutral stimulus. Later the rats would be exposed to radiation or drugs (the unconditioned stimulus), which would make the rats sick. Through these experiments, Garcia discovered that if a rat became nauseated after presented with a new taste, even if the illness occurred several hours later, the rat would avoid that taste. This contradicted the belief that, for conditioning to occur, the unconditioned response (in this case, sickness) must immediately follow the conditioned stimulus-to-be (the taste). Secondly, Garcia discovered that the rats developed aversions to tastes, but not to sights or sounds, disproving the previously held theory that any perceivable stimulus (light, sound, taste, etc.) could become a conditioned stimulus for any unconditioned stimulus.
Garcia’s discovery, conditioned taste aversion, is considered a survival mechanism because it allows an organism to recognize foods that have previously been determined to be poisonous, hopefully allowing said organism to avoid sickness.
As a result of Garcia’s work, conditioned taste aversion has been called the “Garcia Effect.”
Throughout his work Garcia also achieved a number of awards such as the Howard Crosby Warren Medal and the APA Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award. He was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1983 and has over 130 publications.
主要参考文献：
1、《西方心理学史》郭本禹著 人民卫生出版社
2、《弗洛伊德文集12卷本》车文博主编 九州出版社
3、《心理学大辞条》黄希庭等主编 上海教育出版社
4、《心理学史导论》 赫根汉著
5、 百度百科词条等
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