The differential fading of disgust and fear reactions to a personal trauma in a non-clinical population

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ABSTRACT Persistent negative emotions are a key post-traumatic stress (PTS) symptom. Disgust occurs during/following traumatic events and predicts PTS symptoms, but is overlooked relative to other negative emotions like fear. Here, we investigate how trauma-related disgust fades—or persists—in memory (i.e., a person's recollection of how they felt during a traumatic event vs. their current feelings), and over time, relative to fear. In a cross-sectional (Study 1; N = 471) and longitudinal (Study 2; N = 160) study, participants rated their disgust and fear reactions to a recent stressful/traumatic event, at the time the event occurred (peritraumatic; “then”) and at present (posttraumatic; “now”). Study 2 participants provided additional “now” emotion ratings 3 months later. Cross-sectional comparisons showed that whilst participants’ disgust and fear reactions were lower in intensity “now” relative to “then”, fear faded to a greater degree than disgust. Time since the traumatic event and PTS symptom severity were not related to disgust's relative persistence. In contrast, disgust and fear similarly persisted longitudinally. We conclude disgust and fear similarly persist over time, but disgust persists in memory more than fear. Understanding how to reduce feelings of disgust following trauma is clinically important, since disgust is more resistant to PTSD treatments than fear.