2316 – Relationship between kinds of disgust and psychiatric symptoms

Abstract

Disgust has been characterized as a basic emotion, with unique physiological, behavioral and cognitive features. Although emotions have been a main subject of psychopathology over the last decades, disgust has recently been labelled as a “forgotten emotion” in psychiatry. The extant literature suggests that disgust seems to be implicated in the etiology and maintenance of specific phobias, in particular small-animal phobias and blood-injury phobia, and the obsessive-compulsive disorder. Likewise, recent research has demonstrated significant associations between disgust and anxiety disorder symptoms. However, there is a growing awareness in clinical psychology that most psychological disorder could be related to disgust experiences. The present study examines the relationships between disgust and a broad range of psychopathological symptoms controlling for general risk factors of anxiety disorders (i.e., anxiety sensitivity and negative affectivity). A large sample of undergraduates completed the Multidimensional Disgust Scale (see Sandin et al.), the Symptom Assessment-45 Questionnaire (Davison et al., 1997; Sandin et al., 2008), the Anxiety Sensitivity Index-3 (Taylor et al., 2007) and the PANAS (Watson et al., 1988, Sandín et al., 1999). Significant positive correlations were found between disgust and various psychopathological symptoms, including symptoms of anxiety, interpersonal sensitivity, obsession-compulsion, depression, paranoid ideation, and other psychopathological symptoms. Hierarchic regression analyses revealed that kinds of disgust were able to differentially predict various types of psychopathological symptoms. These links were not removed when controlling for anxiety sensitivity and neuroticism. Results support the view that different forms of disgust seem relevant for various symptoms of psychopathology.