Disgust and Contamination Fear: Attention, Memory, and Judgment of Stimulus Situations

Abstract

Biases of attention and memory for disgust have been recently observed. Additionally, the relevance of disgust to contamination fear has been well documented in self-report and behavior avoidance tests. The present study examined the role of disgust in attention and memory bias in individuals with elevated contamination fear, compared to those with high trait anxiety and non-anxious controls. Further, an interpretive bias task was administered. Sixty participants (n = 20 per group) were identified and engaged in a masked emotional stroop test, implicit memory task, and ambiguous interpretation task. The results did not support the hypothesis that individuals with elevated contamination fear would show biases of attention or memory for disgust information, when compared to neutral or social threat material. However, there was evidence of an interpretation bias such that individuals with high contamination fear showed a tendency to interpret situations based on disgust reactions. The findings are discussed ...