The effect of disgust and fear modeling on children's disgust and fear for animals.

Chris Askew,Gemma Reynolds,Kübra Çakır,Liine Põldsam

doi:10.1037/a0037228

Abstract

Disgust is a protective emotion associated with certain types of animal fears. Given that a primary function of disgust is to protect against harm, increasing children’s disgust-related beliefs for animals may affect how threatening they think animals are and their avoidance of them. One way that children’s disgust beliefs for animals might change is via vicarious learning: by observing others responding to the animal with disgust. In Experiment 1, children (ages 7–10 years) were presented with images of novel animals together with adult faces expressing disgust. Children’s fear beliefs and avoidance preferences increased for these disgust-paired animals compared with unpaired control animals. Experiment 2 used the same procedure and compared disgust vicarious learning with vicarious learning with fear faces. Children’s fear beliefs and avoidance preferences for animals again increased as a result of disgust vicarious learning, and animals seen with disgust or fear faces were also rated more disgusting than control animals. The relationship between increased fear beliefs and avoidance preferences for animals was mediated by disgust for the animals. The experiments demonstrate that children can learn to believe that animals are disgusting and threatening after observing an adult responding with disgust toward them. The findings also suggest a bidirectional relationship between fear and disgust with fear-related vicarious learning leading to increased disgust for animals and disgust-related vicarious learning leading to increased fear and avoidance.

Highlights

Disgust is considered to be one of the basic emotions and is protective, preventing contamination and ingestion of harmful substances (Rozin & Fallon, 1987)
Fear and anxiety are both components of anxiety disorders but are distinct from one another (Davey, 2011): Anxiety is typically characterized as the anticipation of threat and experienced through feelings of fear, apprehen
Matchett and Davey’s (1991) disease-avoidance model suggests that disgust plays such an important role in some fears because it leads to avoidance in an attempt to avert contamination

Summary

Introduction

Disgust is considered to be one of the basic emotions and is protective, preventing contamination and ingestion of harmful substances (Rozin & Fallon, 1987). One way that stimuli are believed to acquire disgusteliciting status is via “contamination”: by coming into contact with something that is already disgusting (Fallon, Rozin, & Pliner, 1984) Evidence suggests that these disgust contamination responses do not develop until approximately 7 years of age, an implicit understanding of contamination may be present much earlier (Brown & Harris, 2012; Brown, Harris, Bell, & Lines, 2012). Many common animal fears may be the result of the animals first becoming either associated with the spread of disease, dirt or contamination, or possessing disgust-evoking perceptual features (e.g., looking like mucus or feces) Once this disgust status is acquired, cultural or familial learning processes can lead to fear development (Matchett & Davey, 1991). Follow-up studies showed similar effects when disgust was nonverbally induced (Muris, Huijding, Mayer, & de Vries, 2012) and a bidirectional relationship between disgust and fear in which disgust-related information increased fear beliefs and threat information increased disgust (Muris et al, 2009)

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Conclusion