Disgust and the Menstrual Cycle (original) (raw)

Evidence that disgust evolved to protect from risk of disease

Proceedings of The Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 2004

Disgust is a powerful human emotion that has been little studied until recently. Current theories do not coherently explain the purpose of disgust, nor why a wide range of stimuli can provoke a similar emotional response. Over 40 000 individuals completed a web-based survey using photo stimuli. Images of objects holding a potential disease threat were reported as signif icantly more disgusting than similar images with little or no disease relevance. This pattern of response was found across all regions of the world. Females reported higher disgust sensitivity than males; there was a constant decline in disgust sensitivity over the life course; and the bodily fluids of strangers were found more disgusting than those of close relatives. These data provide evidence that the human disgust emotion may be an evolved response to objects in the environment that represent threats of infectious disease.

Evolution, development, and the emergence of disgust

Evolutionary developmental psychology typically utilizes an evolutionary lens to explain various phenomena that occur throughout development. In this paper, I argue that the converse is also important: Developmental evidence can inform evolutionary theory. In particular, knowledge about the developmental origins of a psychological trait can be used to evaluate theoretical claims about its evolved function. I use the emotion of disgust as a case study to illustrate this approach. Disgust is commonly thought to be a behavioral adaptation for avoiding the ingestion of pathogens. Given this claim, disgust should be expected to develop at a time when humans are especially vulnerable to the dangers of ingesting pathogens, during the immediate post-weaning period from about 3 to 5 years of age. Despite a strong selective pressure at this point in development, research has suggested that the emotion of disgust and the recognition of the "disgust face" do not reliably emerge until later in ontogeny, at 5 years of age or after. Given the late developmental appearance of disgust, I re-evaluate claims about its adaptive role.

Disgust: Evolved function and structure

Psychological Review, 2013

Interest in and research on disgust has surged over the past few decades. The field, however, still lacks a coherent theoretical framework for understanding the evolved function or functions of disgust. Here we present such a framework, emphasizing 2 levels of analysis: that of evolved function and that of information processing. Although there is widespread agreement that disgust evolved to motivate the avoidance of contact with disease-causing organisms, there is no consensus about the functions disgust serves when evoked by acts unrelated to pathogen avoidance. Here we suggest that in addition to motivating pathogen avoidance, disgust evolved to regulate decisions in the domains of mate choice and morality. For each proposed evolved function, we posit distinct information processing systems that integrate function-relevant information and account for the trade-offs required of each disgust system. By refocusing the discussion of disgust on computational mechanisms, we recast prior theorizing on disgust into a framework that can generate new lines of empirical and theoretical inquiry.

Current Theories of Sensory and Interpersonal Disgust

An overview of current theories (including mine) on sensory and interpersonal disgust. This is the first and only paper that I know of that attempts to explain why humans are the only species known to experience disgust.

Maggots and morals: Physical disgust is to fear as moral disgust is to anger

242 words): Putrid food, fetid smells, disfiguring diseases, and a variety of bodily products are disgusting. Incest, bestiality, and many moral transgressions are also disgusting. Does disgust refer to a single emotion, or more than one? Theorists disagree. Many researchers have treated disgust more or less as a homogeneous emotion with a set of prototypical experiential, expressive, physiological, and functional features. Others have proposed two broad clusters of emotional experience, physical disgust and moral disgust, and elicited them using different stimuli. We argue that from an appraisal theory point of view the two kinds of disgust involve different appraisals and thus different experiences, physiologies, action tendencies, and motivations to regulate expression. We hypothesized that physical disgust shares attributes with fear and moral disgust with anger. Using the GRID data, we found that some of the attributes associated with disgust overlapped with those associated with fear, whereas a different set of attributes overlapped with those associated with anger, suggesting two different kinds of disgust, physical and moral. Moral disgust and anger are characterized by a constellation of featuresmost notably the attribution of agency to another person, the violation of social norms, the presence of value-laden judgments, and the urge to approach and punish. Physical disgust and fear involve no value-laden judgment, but a sense of weakness/submissiveness and an urge to avoid and comply. These finding raise new questions about the role of agency, emotional complexity, and cultural-linguistic variations in the two kinds of disgust.

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

Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 2009

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 three qualitatively different adaptive problems related to pathogen avoidance, mate choice, and social interaction. We investigated this three-domain model of disgust across four studies and examined how sensitivity to these functional domains relates to individual differences in other psychological constructs. Consistent with our predictions, factor analyses demonstrated that disgust sensitivity partitions into domains related to pathogens, sexuality, and morality. Further, sensitivity to the three domains shows predictable differentiation based on sex, perceived vulnerability to disease, psychopathic tendencies, and Big Five personality traits. In exploring these three domains of disgust, we 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 neuroscientific investigations.

On the relationships between disgust and morality: a critical review

Psicothema , 2013

Background. Disgust is, at its core, an emotion that responds to cues of parasites and infection, likely to be evolved to protect human organism to the risk of disease. Interestingly, a growing body of research implicates disgust as an emotion central to human morality. The fact that disgust is associated with appraisals of moral transgressions and that this emotion influences moral judgments supposes a remarkable puzzle: Why an emotion that originally functions in the domain of infectious entities does become such a good candidate to play the role of a moral arbiter? The aim of the present review is to clarify the nature of the relationship between disgust and morality. Method. First, we examine the relevant features of disgust in order to explore whether disgust’s phenomenology favors its implementation as a defensive mechanism against offensive social entities. Second, we critically review the most striking findings about the effects of disgust on moral judgments. Results. The revisited analysis of the literature strongly suggests a bidirectional causal link between disgust and moral cognition. Conclusions. We propose that the particular phenomenology of disgust (which involves a sense of offensiveness and rejection) favored the co-adaptation of this emotion to the moral domain.

Disgust – cultural and psychological conditions of „natural“ bodily reaction

Physiotherapy, 2014

An infant does not experience the boundary between its Self and the outside world. Its body is like a fortress to be guarded against the assailing alien reality. At first, the child’s doting parents assume the role of guardians explaining what is “clean” and what is “unclean” as well as what should be appropriated. On the body level subject creating processes become apparent much earlier than it was postulated by Freud and Lacan, long before the maturing individual is subjected to cultural initiation. The processes of bodily self-separation precede language acquisition. According to Kristeva “abjection” not only predates but is also a condition of achieving symbolic identity.