Once a forgotten emotion, disgust is now studied in fields from evolutionary to clinical psychology. Although highly adaptive as a pathogen avoidance mechanism, disgust is prone to false positives. Indeed, several anxiety-related disorders involve excessive and irrational disgust. Furthermore, disgust resists corrective information, making it difficult to treat through cognitive-behavioral therapies. A deeper understanding of disgust could improve the treatment of mental disorders and other societal problems involving this peculiar emotion. However, researchers may need to improve the measurement of disgust to gain such insights. In this paper, we review psychology’s “measurement crisis” in the context of disgust. We suggest that self-report measures, though optimal in reliability, have compromised validity because the vernacular usage of disgust captures neighboring states of discomfort and disapproval. In addition to potential validity issues, we find that most non-self-report measures of disgust have questionable reliability. Internal consistency and test-retest reliability were rarely reported for psychophysiological and neural measures, but the information available suggests that these measures of disgust have poor reliability and may not support individual difference research crucial to clinical psychology. In light of this assessment, we provide several recommendations for improving the reliability and validity of disgust measurement, including renewed attention to theory.
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