Abstract
Disgust is argued to be an emotion that motivates the avoidance of disease-causing entities in the physical domain and unacceptable behaviors in the social-moral domain. Empirical work from behavioral, physiological and brain imaging studies suggests moral judgments are strongly modulated by disgust feelings. Yet, it remains unclear how they are related in the time course of neural processing. Examining the temporal order of disgust emotion and morality could help to clarify the role of disgust in moral judgments. In the present research, a Go/No-Go paradigm was employed to evoke lateralized readiness potentials (LRPs) to investigate the temporal order of physical disgust and moral information processing. Participants were asked to give a “yes” or “no” response regarding the physical disgust and moral wrongness of a social act. The results showed that the evaluation of moral information was processed prior to that of physical disgust information. This suggests that moral information is available earlier than physical disgust, and provides more data on the biological heterogeneity between disgust and morality in terms of the time course of neural activity. The findings implicate that physical disgust emotion may not be necessary for people to make moral judgments. They also suggest that some of our moral experience may be more fundamental (than physical disgust experience) to our survival and development, as humans spend a considerable amount of time engaging in social interaction.
Highlights
Disgust is regarded as one of the basic emotions, as it meets critical criteria that are considered to be essential to any basic emotion [1]
Little is known about the questions of whether there is a temporal order of disgust and morality and when disgust emotion is extracted from moral judgments
The majority of participants reported feeling physically disgusted by wrong and physically repulsive (WD) and ND statements, while only a small number had the same feeling for WN and neutral and emotionally neutral (NN) statements
Summary
Disgust is regarded as one of the basic emotions, as it meets critical criteria that are considered to be essential to any basic emotion [1]. The output system of disgust has remained constant during human evolution. According to Rozin et al(2000), the elicitors of disgust have expanded from the physical domain, such as contaminated food, human and animal waste, poor hygiene, contact with dead bodies, and so on, to the social-moral domain, such as interpersonal disgust, improper sexual behaviors and moral violations [1]. Disgust elicitors in the physical domain are mostly concrete stimuli and are related to contamination that may cause physical diseases in the human body. On the other hand, is more abstract and is related to a variety of moral violations which could be a threat to the ‘‘human soul’’. The function of disgust is claimed to have been transformed from ‘‘the guardian of the mouth’’ to ‘‘the guardian of the soul’’ [1,3,4]
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