Undisguised disgust: a psychometric evaluation of a disgust propensity measure

Abstract

Disgust, considered as one of the basic emotions universally shared across various cultures, has only recently attracted increased research interest. Originally developed as a key component of the behavioural immune system serving to protect the body from infectious pathogens, disgust has taken on other roles such as guiding our moral judgements, political preferences, or even choices of sexual partners. Despite these adaptive roles, disgust may, on the other hand, be responsible for negative social (xenophobia, homophobia) or clinical phenomena (common anxiety disorders such as specific phobias of obsessive-compulsive disorder), thus, a reliable measure of individual tendencies to experience disgust is indispensable. The aim of this study was to develop and analyse a Czech version of the Disgust Scale – Revised, one of the most widely used assessment of disgust propensity. Using a back-translation procedure and a counterbalanced test-retest experimental design, we demonstrated that scores on the Czech measure correlated with those on the English original (test-retest reliability r = 0.82) and both measures were found equivalent (p = 0.019). We also adopted a general linear model to show that the level of disgust is affected by sex, age, and education/occupancy, as women and people with no biology education score significantly higher than men and biologists, respectively. Finally, our data provide support to a bifactor model composed of general disgust taping into all items in addition to three distinct disgust domains.