Abstract
For prepubertal youth, sexual stimuli elicit disgust and avoidance, yet in adolescence this avoidance shifts to sexual approach. One explanation could be that disgust declines in adolescence. This project examined whether disgust is indeed lower in adolescence compared to preadolescence, and whether this difference across age groups would be restricted to sex-relevant disgust elicitors. We also examined whether the strength of disgust would depend on familiarity between participant and source. To examine disgust responses in youths, two cross-sectional studies (N = 248, ages six to 17 years) were conducted using scenario-based measurements. Disgust was overall higher in early adolescence than in preadolescence and relatively weak when the source of disgust was a familiar person. Specifically, when parents were the source, sex-relevant disgust was higher in the groups of early and middle adolescents than in the group of preadolescents. Sex-relevant disgust elicited by a stranger or best friend, however, was lower in middle than in early adolescence. The latter is consistent with the view that repeated confrontation with disgusting stimuli might attenuate disgust, which could contribute to healthy sexual functioning. The heightened sex-relevant disgust in middle adolescents when parents were the source might reflect a functional avoidance mechanism of inappropriate sex mates.
Highlights
Consistent with the hypothesis that the variation in subjective disgust responses toward sex-relevant versus sexirrelevant disgust across the three age groups would vary as a function of familiarity, a significant three-way interaction of disgust type, familiarity, and age group [F (3.83, 392.66) = 5.11, p < .001, ηp2 = .05; see Table 2] was found
When strangers and best friends were the source of sex-relevant disgust, disgust showed a decline over the three age groups that was most prominent between the early adolescence to middle adolescence group
The variation of disgust responding provided no evidence to suggest that early adolescence would be characterized by lowered disgust response as a means to support engagement in sexual behaviors
Summary
ParticipantsFor Study 1, a group of children between ages six and 17 was recruited from a small private school near Hamburg, Germany. 148 children completed the study and, after the inclusion criteria were met (e.g., no moderate to severe learning disabilities), 139 participants (female, n = 74; male, n = 65) could be included in the analysis. After the inclusion criteria were met, 109 participants (female, n = 63; male, n = 46) were included in the analysis. Power analysis using GPower (Erdfelder, Faul, & Buchner, 1996), with power = .80 and an alpha level of .05, indicated that to reliably detect differences with a large effect size (Cohen’s f = .40) in a mixed analysis of variance (ANOVA) with 12 groups (3 [age] × 2 [sex] × 2 [country]) and six repeated measurements (2 [type of disgust] × 3 [familiarity]), we needed a total sample size of at least 204 participants. The current study had sufficient power to reliably detect differences with a large effect size
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