A perspective on disgust.

Approaches disgust as a food-related emotion and defines it as revulsion at the prospect of oral incorporation of offensive objects. These objects have contamination properties; if they contact an otherwise acceptable food, they tend to render it inedible. Issues considered include: the nature of the objects of disgust and why they are virtually all of animal origin, the meaning of oral incorporation, the belief that people take on the properties of the foods they eat, the nature of the contamination response and its relation to the laws of sympathetic magic (similarity and contagion), and the ontogeny of disgust, which is believed to develop during the 1st 8 yrs of life. The idea that feces, the universal disgust object, is also the 1st is explored, and the mechanisms for the acquisition of disgust are examined. Disgust is recommended as an easily studiable emotion, a model for cognitive–affective linkages, and a model for the acquisition of values and culture. (103 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Studies on the role of disgust in the acquisition and maintenance of specific phobias

Disgust has been proposed as a possible factor in phobic acquisition and maintenance, particularly in spider phobia. Cognitions and processes concerning disgust were examined in a series of studies with spider phobics, other specific phobics and nonphobic controls. Beliefs about the disgusting nature of their phobic objects were present in phobics but did not contribute to an attentional bias. Measures of global disgust sensitivity were not closely linked to the phobic fear response. The disgust associated with phobic objects appears to have different constituents to the disgust associated with objects that do not evoke the phobic response. In the light of evidence presented here, it seems unlikely that disgust plays a central role in the aetiology or maintenance of spider phobia in particular and specific phobias in general. It is proposed that when stimuli normally associated with disgust become the focus of phobic anxiety the disgust response may be amplified.     

Microbes, mating, and morality: Individual differences in three functional domains of disgust.

What is the function of disgust? Whereas traditional models have suggested that disgust serves to protect the self or neutralize reminders of our animal nature, an evolutionary perspective suggests that disgust functions to solve 3 qualitatively different adaptive problems related to pathogen avoidance, mate choice, and social interaction. The authors investigated this 3-domain model of disgust across 4 studies and examined how sensitivity to these functional domains relates to individual differences in other psychological constructs. Consistent with their predictions, factor analyses demonstrated that disgust sensitivity partitions into domains related to pathogens, sexuality, and morality. Further, sensitivity to the 3 domains showed predictable differentiation based on sex, perceived vulnerability to disease, psychopathic tendencies, and Big 5 personality traits. In exploring these 3 domains of disgust, the authors introduce a new measure of disgust sensitivity. Appreciation of the functional heterogeneity of disgust has important implications for research on individual differences in disgust sensitivity, emotion, clinical impairments, and neuroscience. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Disgust and spider phobia.

Twenty-four women with spider phobia and 45 nonphobic women completed the Disgust Questionnaire (DQ; R Rozin, A. E. Fallon, & R. Mandell; see record 1984-14781-001) and the Spider Phobia Questionnaire (SPQ; R. Klorman, T. C. Weerts, J. E. Hastings, B. G. Melamed, & R J. Lang; see record 1974-30308-001). Participants also underwent behavioral tests concerning disgust sensitivity and fear of spiders. Spider phobic women showed stronger disgust sensitivity than nonphobic women, and spiders were found to have a disgust evoking status that was related to participants' fear of spiders. The relationship between DQ and SPQ was independent of neuroticism and introversion. DQ scores were not associated with a global measure of phobic complaints (i.e., Fear Questionnaire; I. M. Marks & A. Mathews; see record 1980-26848-001). Results are consistent with a disease-avoidance model of spider phobia (G. Matchett & G. C. L. Davey; see record 1991-18606-001), which emphasizes the role of disgust in spider phobia. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Recognizing masked threat: Fear betrays, but disgust you can trust.

If emotions guide consciousness, people may recognize degraded objects in center view more accurately if they either fear the objects or are disgusted by them. Therefore, we studied whether recognition of spiders and snakes correlates with individual differences in spider fear, snake fear, and disgust sensitivity. Female students performed a recognition task with pictures of spiders, snakes, flowers, and mushrooms as well as blanks. Pictures were backward masked to reduce picture visibility. Signal detection analyses showed that recognition of spiders and snakes was correlated with disgust sensitivity but not with fear of spiders or snakes. Further, spider fear correlated with the tendency to misinterpret blanks as threatening (response bias). These findings suggest that effects on recognition and response biases to emotional pictures vary for different emotions and emotional traits. Whereas fear may induce response biases, disgust may facilitate recognition. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The cognitive and neural correlates of tactile memory.

Tactile memory systems are involved in the storage and retrieval of information about stimuli that impinge on the body surface and objects that people explore haptically. Here, the authors review the behavioral, neuropsychological, neurophysiological, and neuroimaging research on tactile memory. This body of research reveals that tactile memory can be subdivided into a number of functionally distinct neurocognitive subsystems, just as is the case with auditory and visual memory. Some of these subsystems are peripheral and short lasting and others are more central and long lasting. The authors highlight evidence showing that the representation of tactile information interacts with information about other sensory attributes (e.g., visual, auditory, and kinaesthetic) of objects/events that people perceive. This fact suggests that at least part of the neural network involved in the memory for touch might be shared among different sensory modalities. In particular, multisensory/amodal information-processing networks seem to play a leading role in the storage of tactile information in the brain. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The moral emotions: A social–functionalist account of anger, disgust, and contempt.

Recent research has highlighted the important role of emotion in moral judgment and decision making (Greene, Sommerville, Nystrom, Darley, & Cohen, 2001; Haidt, 2001). What is less clear is whether distinctions should be drawn among specific moral emotions. Although some have argued for differences among anger, disgust, and contempt (Rozin, Lowery, Imada, & Haidt, 1999), others have suggested that these terms may describe a single undifferentiated emotional response to morally offensive behavior (Nabi, 2002). In this article, we take a social–functionalist perspective, which makes the prediction that these emotions should be differentiable both in antecedent appraisals and in consequent actions and judgments. Studies 1–3 tested and found support for our predictions concerning distinctions among antecedent appraisals, including (a) a more general role for disgust than has been previously been described, (b) an effect of self-relevance on anger but not other emotions, and (c) a role for contempt in judging incompetent actions. Studies 4 and 5 tested and found support for our specific predictions concerning functional outcomes, providing evidence that these emotions are associated with different consequences. Taken together, these studies support a social–functionalist account of anger, disgust, and contempt and lay the foundation for future research on the negative interpersonal emotions. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)     

Predicting features for members of natural categories when categorization is uncertain.

An important function of concepts is to allow the prediction of unseen features. A Bayesian account of feature prediction suggests that people will consider all the categories an object could belong to when they judge the likelihood that the object has a feature. The judgment and decision literature suggests that they may instead use a simpler heuristic in which they consider only the most likely category. In 3 experiments, no evidence was found that participants took into account alternative categories as well as the most likely one when they judged feature probabilities for familiar objects in meaningful contexts. These results, in conjunction with those of G. L. Murphy and B. H. Ross (1994), suggest that although people may consider alternative categories in certain limited situations, they often do not. Reasons for why the use of alternative categories may be relatively rare are discussed, and conditions under which people may take alternative categories into account are outlined. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Mental set and creative thought in social conflict: Threat rigidity versus motivated focus.

According to the traditional threat-rigidity reasoning, people in social conflict will be less flexible, less creative, more narrow-minded, and more rigid in their thinking when they adopt a conflict rather than a cooperation mental set. The authors propose and test an alternative, motivated focus account that better fits existing evidence. The authors report experimental results inconsistent with a threat-rigidity account, but supporting the idea that people focus their cognitive resources on conflict-related material more when in a conflict rather than a cooperation mental set: Disputants with a conflict (cooperation) set have broader (smaller) and more (less) inclusive cognitive categories when the domain of thought is (un)related to conflict (Experiment 1a-1b). Furthermore, they generate more, and more original competition tactics (Experiments 2 - 4), especially when they have low rather than high need for cognitive closure. Implications for conflict theory, for motivated information processing, and creativity research are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Anger, disgust, and the negative aesthetic emotions: Expanding an appraisal model of aesthetic experience.

Negative aesthetic emotions, such as disgust and anger, are central to understanding why people reject, deface, and censor art. Psychological theories of aesthetic preferences have little to say about negative aesthetic emotions, however, and the major theories associated with Berlyne and Martindale cannot in principle explain emotions like anger and disgust. The present research uses a recent appraisal model of aesthetic emotions to illuminate negative responses to art. People viewed a set of pictures, which included offensive and controversial works. The predictions were based on the appraisal profiles of anger and disgust. As expected, anger was associated with appraising a picture as incongruent with one's values and as intentionally offensive, and disgust was associated with appraising a picture as incongruent with one's values and as unpleasant. Implications for competing theories of aesthetic emotions are considered. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Neural structures associated with recognition of facial expressions of basic emotions

People with Huntington's disease and people suffering from obsessive compulsive disorder show severe deficits in recognizing facial expressions of disgust, whereas people with lesions restricted to the amygdala are especially impaired in recognizing facial expressions of fear. This double dissociation implies that recognition of certain basic emotions may be associated with distinct and non-overlapping neural substrates. Some authors, however, emphasize the general importance of the ventral parts of the frontal cortex in emotion recognition, regardless of the emotion being recognized. In this study, we used functional magnetic resonance imaging to locate neural structures that are critical for recognition of facial expressions of basic emotions by investigating cerebral activation of six healthy adults performing a gender discrimination task on images of faces expressing disgust, fear and anger. Activation in response to these faces was compared with that for faces showing neutral expressions. Disgusted facial expressions activated the right putamen and the left insula cortex, whereas enhanced activity in the posterior part of the right gyrus cinguli and the medial temporal gyrus of the left hemisphere was observed during processing of angry faces. Fearful expressions activated the right fusiform gyrus and the left dorsolateral frontal cortex. For all three emotions investigated, we also found activation of the inferior part of the left frontal cortex (Brodmann area 47). These results support the hypotheses derived from neuropsychological findings, that (i) recognition of disgust, fear and anger is based on separate neural systems, and that (ii) the output of these systems converges on frontal regions for further information processing.     

Disgust sensitivity predicts intuitive disapproval of gays.

Two studies demonstrate that a dispositional proneness to disgust (“disgust sensitivity”) is associated with intuitive disapproval of gay people. Study 1 was based on previous research showing that people are more likely to describe a behavior as intentional when they see it as morally wrong (see Knobe, 2006, for a review). As predicted, the more disgust sensitive participants were, the more likely they were to describe an agent whose behavior had the side effect of causing gay men to kiss in public as having intentionally encouraged gay men to kiss publicly—even though most participants did not explicitly think it wrong to encourage gay men to kiss in public. No such effect occurred when subjects were asked about heterosexual kissing. Study 2 used the Implicit Association Test (IAT; Nosek, Banaji, & Greenwald, 2006) as a dependent measure. The more disgust sensitive participants were, the more they showed unfavorable automatic associations with gay people as opposed to heterosexuals. Two studies demonstrate that a dispositional proneness to disgust (“disgust sensitivity”) is associated with intuitive disapproval of gay people. Study 1 was based on previous research showing that people are more likely to describe a behavior as intentional when they see it as morally wrong (see Knobe, 2006, for a review). As predicted, the more disgust sensitive participants were, the more likely they were to describe an agent whose behavior had the side effect of causing gay men to kiss in public as having intentionally encouraged gay men to kiss publicly—even though most participants did not explicitly think it wrong to encourage gay men to kiss in public. No such effect occurred when subjects were asked about heterosexual kissing. Study 2 used the Implicit Association Test (IAT; Nosek, Banaji, & Greenwald, 2006) as a dependent measure. The more disgust sensitive participants were, the more they showed unfavorable automatic associations with gay people as opposed to heterosexuals. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Moral anger, but not moral disgust, responds to intentionality.

We propose that, when people judge moral situations, anger responds to the contextual cues of harm and intentionality. On the other hand, disgust responds uniquely to whether or not a bodily norm violation has occurred; its apparent response to harm and intent is entirely explained by the coactivation of anger. We manipulated intent, harm, and bodily norm violation (eating human flesh) within a vignette describing a scientific experiment. Participants then rated their anger, disgust, and moral judgment, as well as various appraisals. Anger responded independently of disgust to harm and intentionality, whereas disgust responded independently of anger only to whether or not the act violated the bodily norm of cannibalism. Theoretically relevant appraisals accounted for the effects of harm and intent on anger; however, appraisals of abnormality did not fully account for the effects of the manipulations on disgust. Our results show that anger and disgust are separately elicited by different cues in a moral situation. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)     

Emotional selection in memes: The case of urban legends.

This article explores how much memes like urban legends succeed on the basis of informational selection (i.e., truth or a moral lesson) and emotional selection (i.e., the ability to evoke emotions like anger, fear, or disgust). The article focuses on disgust because its elicitors have been precisely described. In Study 1, with controls for informational factors like truth, people were more willing to pass along stories that elicited stronger disgust. Study 2 randomly sampled legends and created versions that varied in disgust; people preferred to pass along versions that produced the highest level of disgust. Study 3 coded legends for specific story motifs that produce disgust (e.g., ingestion of a contaminated substance) and found that legends that contained more disgust motifs were distributed more widely on urban legend Web sites. The conclusion discusses implications of emotional selection for the social marketplace of ideas. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Social justifications for moral emotions: When reasons for disgust are less elaborated than for anger.

In the present research, we tested the unreasoning disgust hypothesis: moral disgust, in particular in response to a violation of a bodily norm, is less likely than moral anger to be justified with cognitively elaborated reasons. In Experiment 1, participants were asked to explain why they felt anger and disgust toward pedophiles. Participants were more likely to invoke elaborated reasons, versus merely evaluative responses, when explaining their anger, versus disgust. Experiment 2 used a between-participants design; participants explained why they felt either anger or disgust toward seven groups that either violated a sexual or nonsexual norm. Again, elaborated reasons were less prevalent when explaining their disgust versus anger and, in particular, when explaining disgust toward a group that violated a sexual norm. Experiment 3 further established that these findings are due to a lower accessibility of elaborated reasons for bodily disgust, rather than inhibition in using them when provided. From these findings, it can be concluded that communicating external reasons for moral disgust at bodily violations is made more difficult due to the unavailability of those reasons to people. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)     

Semantic processing precedes affect retrieval: The neurological case for cognitive primacy in visual processing.

According to the affective primacy hypothesis, visual stimuli can be evaluated prior to and independent of object identification and semantic analysis (Zajonc, 1980, 2000). Our review concludes that the affective primacy hypothesis is, from the available evidence, not likely correct. Although people can react to objects that they cannot consciously identify, such affective reactions are dependent upon prior semantic analysis within the visual cortex. The authors propose that the features of objects must first be integrated, and then the objects themselves must be categorized and identified, all prior to affective analysis. Additionally, the authors offer a preliminary neurological analysis of the mere exposure and affective priming effects that is consistent with the claim that semantic analysis is needed to elicit these effects. In sum, the authors conclude that the brain must know what something is in order to know whether it is good or bad. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Touch communicates distinct emotions.

The study of emotional signaling has focused almost exclusively on the face and voice. In 2 studies, the authors investigated whether people can identify emotions from the experience of being touched by a stranger on the arm (without seeing the touch). In the 3rd study, they investigated whether observers can identify emotions from watching someone being touched on the arm. Two kinds of evidence suggest that humans can communicate numerous emotions with touch. First, participants in the United States (Study 1) and Spain (Study 2) could decode anger, fear, disgust, love, gratitude, and sympathy via touch at much-better-than-chance levels. Second, fine-grained coding documented specific touch behaviors associated with different emotions. In Study 3, the authors provide evidence that participants can accurately decode distinct emotions by merely watching others communicate via touch. The findings are discussed in terms of their contributions to affective science and the evolution of altruism and cooperation. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The illusion of transparency: biased assessments of others' ability to read one's emotional states

Three sets of studies provide evidence for an illusion of transparency, or a tendency for people to overestimate the extent to which others can discern their internal states. People often mistakenly believe that their internal states "leak out" more than they really do. The authors attribute this bias to a tendency for people to adjust insufficiently from the "anchor" of their own phenomenological experience when attempting to take another's perspective. Evidence for this illusion is provided by showing that liars overestimate the detectability of their lies (Studies 1a, 1b, and 1c) and that people believe their feelings of disgust are more apparent than they actually are (Studies 2a and 2b). A final pair of experiments (Studies 3a and 3b) explores the implications of the illusion of transparency for people's reluctance to intervene in emergencies. All 3 sets of studies also provide evidence consistent with the proposed anchoring and adjustment interpretation.     

Accessible attitudes influence categorization of multiply categorizable objects.

Every person or object can be categorized in multiple ways. For example, a person can be categorized (and hence stereotyped) by gender, age, race, or occupation. Earlier research demonstrated that objects toward which people have highly accessible attitudes attract attention when they are present in the visual field. On the basis of that work, the authors hypothesized that categories toward which people have highly accessible attitudes are preferentially applied to multiply categorizable objects. Three experiments, with cued recall and categorization response time as dependent variables, support the hypothesis. Categories toward which people's attitudes had been rendered accessible by an earlier task were more readily produced in response to multiply categorizable objects serving as a cue, or could more quickly be verified as fitting the object. These results demonstrate the power and functional value of accessible attitudes in shaping basic categorization and judgmental processes. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)