Specificity of disgust sensitivity in the prediction of behavioral avoidance in contamination fear

Disgust triggers behavioral avoidance of pathogen-carrying and fitness-reducing agents. However, because of the cost involved, disgust sensitivity should be flexible, varying as a function of an individual’s immunity. Asymptomatic colonization with Staphylococcus aureus often results from weakened immunity and is a potential source of subsequent infections. In this study, we tested if pharyngeal colonization with S. aureus, evaluated based on a single swab collection, is related to an individual’s disgust sensitivity, measured with the Three Domain Disgust Scale. Levels of immunomodulating hormones (cortisol and testosterone), general health, and body adiposity were controlled. Women (N = 95), compared to men (N = 137), displayed higher sexual disgust sensitivity, but the difference between individuals with S. aureus and without S. aureus was significant only in men, providing support for prophylactic hypothesis, explaining inter-individual differences in disgust sensitivity. Men (but not women) burdened with asymptomatic S. aureus presence in pharynx exhibit higher pathogen disgust (p = 0.04) compared to individuals in which S. aureus was not detected. The positive relationship between the presence of the pathogen and sexual disgust was close to the statistical significance level (p = 0.06), and S. aureus colonization was not related with moral disgust domain.

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Does cognitive flexibility moderate the relationship between disgust sensitivity and contamination fear?

European Psychiatry ◽

10.1016/j.eurpsy.2016.01.481 ◽

2016 ◽

Vol 33 (S1) ◽

pp. S202-S202

Author(s):

E. Powell

Keyword(s):

Cognitive Flexibility ◽

Clinical Population ◽

Sample Population ◽

Disgust Sensitivity ◽

Contributing Factors ◽

Obsessive Compulsive ◽

Compulsive Disorder ◽

Contamination Fear ◽

Competing Interest ◽

The Relationship

High disgust sensitivity and poor cognitive flexibility have been independently identified as contributing factors in the aetiology of obsessive-compulsive disorder. This study looks at the relationship between contamination fear and disgust sensitivity in a non-clinical population. In particular, at whether two moderating factors, cognitive flexibility and emotional reappraisal, have a buffering influence. One hundred participants from an undergraduate population completed a battery of questionnaires which rated their disgust and level of contamination fear. They also completed a set-shifting task to assess cognitive flexibility and an emotion regulation questionnaire. The mean age of the sample was 21.4 years with 62% of the sample population being female. SPSS 16 was used to correlate the main variables using Pearson's correlation and moderated regression, using MODPROBE, was used for analysis. Results confirmed previous findings that high disgust sensitivity is significantly associated with contamination fear (P < 0.01). In addition to this, both cognitive flexibility and emotional reappraisal reduced the influence that disgust has on an individual's contamination fear. Cognitive flexibility and emotion reappraisal were not found to be significantly correlated to each other (P = 0.511), which suggest that these variables moderate the relationship between disgust and contamination fear independently of each other. Individuals with poor cognitive flexibility and/or poor emotional reappraisal were found to have high levels of contamination fear, which suggests that these two variables may attenuate the relationship between disgust and contamination fear. Future implications of these findings have been discussed although further research is needed to confirm these conclusions in a clinical population.Disclosure of interestThe author has not supplied his/her declaration of competing interest.

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Disgust sensitivity and emotion regulation potentiate the effect of disgust propensity on spider fear, blood-injection-injury fear, and contamination fear

Journal of Behavior Therapy and Experimental Psychiatry ◽

10.1016/j.jbtep.2008.10.002 ◽

2009 ◽

Vol 40 (2) ◽

pp. 219-229 ◽

Cited By ~ 43

Author(s):

Josh M. Cisler ◽

Bunmi O. Olatunji ◽

Jeffrey M. Lohr

Keyword(s):

Emotion Regulation ◽

Disgust Sensitivity ◽

Spider Fear ◽

Contamination Fear ◽

Injection Injury ◽

Blood Injection ◽

Disgust Propensity

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Beggars Can’t Be Choosers: Disgust as a Cue and Signal of Social Status

10.31219/osf.io/wrvgh ◽

2019 ◽

Author(s):

TCU Hill Lab

Keyword(s):

Social Status ◽

Impression Management ◽

Person Perception ◽

Disgust Sensitivity ◽

Sensitivity Functions ◽

Avoidance Behaviors ◽

Behavioral Avoidance ◽

Naturally Occurring ◽

Pathogen Avoidance ◽

The Relationship

Disgust is a costly emotion, as it prompts behavioral avoidance of stimuli and conspecifics perceived to pose a contamination threat, limiting the number of mating, caloric, or affiliative opportunities available to a person. Disgust sensitivity should vary based on the costs of reducing the potential options available for solving a given adaptive challenge, being higher for those who have more options, and lower for those who have few. Given that social status plays an important role in modulating the costs associated with pathogen avoidance behaviors, we predicted that social status would be conceptually linked to disgust sensitivity in ways that have important implications for person perception. Findings reveal that disgust sensitivity functions as an important cue to target’s social status, and that targets with naturally occurring cues of high (vs. low) social status are perceived to experience greater disgust. In addition to serving as a cue to social status, findings reveal that disgust may also be used to signal social status to others, particularly when one’s status is threatened. By establishing a conceptual linkage between disgust sensitivity and social status, the current research provides important insights regarding the relationship between these two constructs and highlights the important role these variables play in processes of person perception and impression management.

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Body Odor Disgust sensitivity predicts stronger moral harshness towards moral violations of purity.

10.31234/osf.io/zaucf ◽

2018 ◽

Author(s):

Marco Tullio Liuzza ◽

Jonas Olofsson ◽

Sebastian Cancino-Montecinos ◽

Torun Lindholm

Keyword(s):

Individual Differences ◽

Open Science ◽

Moral Judgments ◽

Body Odor ◽

Disgust Sensitivity ◽

Disease Avoidance ◽

Behavioral Avoidance ◽

Science Framework ◽

Related Trait ◽

Anger Reactivity

Detecting pathogen threats and avoiding disease is fundamental to human survival. The Behavioral Immune System (BIS) framework outlines a set of psychological functions that may have evolved for this purpose. Disgust is a core emotion that plays a pivotal role in the BIS, as it activates the behavioral avoidance motives that prevent people from being in contact with pathogens. To date, there has been little agreement on how disgust sensitivity might underlie moral judgments. Here, we investigated moral violations of “purity” (assumed to elicit disgust) and violations of “harm” (assumed to elicit anger). We hypothesized that individual differences in BIS-related traits would be associated with greater disgust (vs. anger) reactivity to, and greater condemnation of purity (vs. harm) violations. The study was pre-registered (https://osf.io/57nm8/). Participants (N = 632) had to rate scenarios concerning moral wrongness or inappropriateness and regarding disgust and anger. To measure individual differences in the activation of the BIS, we used our recently developed Body Odor Disgust Scale (BODS), a BIS-related trait measure that assesses individual differences in feeling disgusted by body odors. In line with our predictions, we found that scores on the BODS relate more strongly to affective reactions to Purity, as compared to Harm, violations. In addition, BODS relates more strongly to Moral condemnation than to perceived Inappropriateness of an action, and to the condemnation of Purity violations as compared to Harm violations. These results suggest that the BIS is involved in moral judgment, although to some extent this role seems to be specific for violations of “moral purity”, a concept that might be rooted in disease avoidance. Data and scripts to analyze the data are available on the Open Science Framework (OSF) repository: https://osf.io/tk4x5/. Planned analyses are available at https://osf.io/x6g3u/

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Self-Reported Sense of Smell Predicts Disgust Sensitivity and Disgust Reactivity

Journal of Individual Differences ◽

10.1027/1614-0001/a000263 ◽

2018 ◽

Vol 39 (4) ◽

pp. 191-195

Author(s):

Nicholas J. Kelley ◽

Adrienne L. Crowell

Keyword(s):

Individual Differences ◽

Individual Difference ◽

Olfactory Stimulus ◽

Disgust Sensitivity ◽

Sense Of Smell ◽

Olfactory Ability ◽

Good Proxy ◽

Insight Into

Abstract. Two studies tested the hypothesis that self-reported sense of smell (i.e., metacognitive insight into one’s olfactory ability) predicts disgust sensitivity and disgust reactivity. Consistent with our predictions two studies demonstrated that disgust correlates with self-reported sense of smell. Studies 1 and 2 demonstrated, from an individual difference perspective, that trait-like differences in disgust relate to self-reported sense of smell. Physical forms of disgust (i.e., sexual and pathogen disgust) drove this association. However, the association between self-reported sense of smell and disgust sensitivity is small, suggesting that it is likely not a good proxy for disgust sensitivity. The results of Study 2 extended this finding by demonstrating that individual differences in self-reported sense of smell influence how individuals react to a disgusting olfactory stimulus. Those who reported having a better sense of smell (or better insight into their olfactory ability) found a disgusting smell significantly more noxious as compared to participants reporting having a poor sense of smell (or poor insight into their olfactory ability). The current findings suggest that a one-item measure of self-reported sense of smell may be an effective tool in disgust research.

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