# counteradaptation
## English
### Alternative forms

* counter-adaptation

### Etymology

From counter- +‎ adaptation.

### Noun

counteradaptation (countable and uncountable, plural counteradaptations)
* adaptation that counters a change to an organism's environment
** (pharmacology) The development of tolerance; the adaptation of the body's homeostatic mechanisms to counteract a drug effect.
*** 1997, Alcohol Health and Research World- Volume 21:Repeated AOD exposure also can lead to adaptations in the reward circuitry that oppose and neutralize a drug's effects (i.e., counteradaptation).
*** 2010, Marie A. Chisholm-Burns, Terry L. Schwinghammer, Barbara G. Wells, Pharmacotherapy Principles and Practice, page 610:Counteradaptation postulates that the initial positive rewarding feelings are followed by the opposing development of tolerance.
*** 2011, William R. Miller, Kathleen M. Carroll, Rethinking Substance Abuse:The conceptual framework of opponent process counteradaptation involves an initial a-process (positive hedonic effect; "light side") occurring shortly after presentation of the reinforcer followed by a b-process (negative hedonic effect; "dark side") appearing after the a-process has terminated.
*** 2013, John E. Niederhuber, James O. Armitage, James H Doroshow, Abeloff's Clinical Oncology, page 363:Sensitization and counteradaptation are two of the major neuroadaptive models that have been proposed to explain how changes that start in the reward pathway may result in the development of substance dependence.
** (biology) The evolutionary adaptation of one species to adaptive changes by another.
*** 1980, Fowden G. Maxwell, Peter Randolph Jennings, Breeding Plants Resistant to Insects, page 132:Thus the plant's allomonic adaptation has been exactly reversed by this insect's counteradaptation.
*** 1999, George W. Cox, Alien Species in North America and Hawaii, page 266:As time goes on, the invading species may become increasingly specialized, and some of its populations eliminated by counteradaptation and changing habitat conditions.
*** 2013, Anne Campbell, A Mind Of Her Own: The evolutionary psychology of women:When the descendants of the initial population of females were returned to them, the females began to die from the effects of sex. The males' sperm, unopposed by female counteradaptation, had become more and more toxic.
** (psychology) The distortion of one sensory modality that accompanies adaptation to alterations in a perceptual cues from a related modality.
*** 1972, S.M. Luria, Christine L. McKay, Steven H. Ferris, Handedness and Adaptation to Distortions of Size and Distance Under Water, page 1:Several investigators haye found little or no adaptation to size, and the phenonmenon of counteradaptation has been offered as an alternative to the explanation that adaptation to a purely visual phenomenon (such as size) occurs through a different process than does adaptation to hand-eye coordination (as adaptation to distance is often measured).
*** 1985, Jo Ann S. Kinney, Human underwater vision: physiology and physics, page 104:Evidence for counteradaptation has been found in several studies; subjects who adapt to, say size, show relatively more distortion of distance, and vice versa (Ross and Lennie 1972; Franklin et al. 1970; Luria et al. 1973).
*** 2013 -, Maurice Hershenson, The Moon illusion, page 188:Franklin, Ross, and Weltman (1970) found that, after divers viewed objects for a 20-min period through a facemask under water that made them appear larger and closer, their mean size and distance estimates frequently revealed an adaptive shift to one dimension accompanied by counteradaptation to the other.

#### Related terms

* counteradapt
* counteradaptive