Kinds Of Disgust Research Articles

The Emotion of Disgust among Medical and Psychology Students.

The emotion of disgust evolved as a way to protect oneself from illness and is associated with aspects of disease avoidance. Disgust Scale–Revised (DS-R) (Olatunji et al., 2008) measures the disgust propensity of three kinds of disgust (core, animal reminder, contamination). Contextual factors, such as academic background, might influence DS-R scoring, especially among medical students, where the notion of disease is central. We examined DS-R scoring and the choice of postgraduate studies in medical (n = 94) and psychology (n = 97) students. In an anonymous web-based survey, participants completed the DS-R and a questionnaire including plans for postgraduate studies. Females outnumbered males and scored higher in total DS-R score (p = 0.003). Psychology students scored higher in all three kinds of disgust (p < 0.001 for core disgust and animal reminder, p = 0.069 for contamination disgust), indicating a higher level of disease avoidance. Medical students willing to follow Internal Medicine scored higher in core disgust (p < 0.05), while psychology students willing to study Experimental Psychology scored lower in the animal reminder subscale (p = 0.019 and p < 0.001 for the association between these subscales and the orientation of Medical and Psychology Students, respectively). In conclusion, disgust propensity as rated by DS-R is related to academic background and orientation preferences in postgraduate studies.

The Struggle with(in) Leontius’ Soul

Abstract In Republic 4, Plato’s Socrates argues that there are three elements in the soul: the rational, the spirited, and the appetitive. This paper focuses on the argument distinguishing spirit from appetite in the story of Leontius. I shall argue that the rational element first opposes Leontius’ appetite and, when appetite overpowers reason, then Leontius’ spirited part opposes the appetitive. Consequently, there is a kind of disgust that would be appropriately characterized as rational; and, drawing on this consequence, I suggest that the primary target of early ethical education is the rational element of the soul.

The Rule of Disgust?: Contemporary Transgender Rights Discourse in India

The Supreme Court of India’s 2014 decision in National Legal Services Authority v. Union of India was a complex opinion coming at a complicated time for India’s LGBTQ community. Decided soon after the Supreme Court’s controversial 2013 decision to overrule the Delhi High Court’s 2009 decision invalidating Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code — criminalizing ‘unnatural sexual offences’ — National Legal Services Authority spoke to the empowerment of India’s transgender communities, if not India’s sexual minorities. Yet the Supreme Court’s seeming distinction between the rights and welfare of transgendered people in India, and the rights and welfare of sexual minorities, was not the only line-drawing that the Court engaged in with National Legal Services Authority. Indeed, the Court also seemed to draw a sharp distinction between transgendered people and cisgendered women and men, in the process not only cabining transgendered persons as a ‘third gender’ but also, perhaps, carving off trans activism from feminism. After this opinion, in fact, it would not be entirely wrong to characterize the ‘official view’ in India of gender, transgenderism, and sexuality as one positing conceptual and ontological differences between these ideas, rather than coalescences. This chapter aims to explore how something like disgust informed this set of legal line-drawing and, moreover, a kind of disgust which is difficult to sift out from other liberal legal practices. As a result, this is also a kind of disgust which will be hard to eradicate in liberal constitutional democracies devoted to the rule of law.

Dimensiones de sensibilidad al asco y predicción diferencial de los síntomas fóbicos [Domains of disgust differentially predict types of phobic symptoms

The present study examines the association between disgust domains and phobic symp- toms (i.e., fears and blood-injections symptoms) in a nonclinical sample (N = 580). Disgust was assessed by two self-report scales, i.e., the Disgust Scale—Revised (DS-R; Haidt et al., 1994) and the Multidimensional Disgust Scale (Escala Multidimensional de Sensibilidad al Asco, EMA; Sandin et al., 2013). The EMA is a new scale which assesses the following domains of disgust: hygiene, moral, sexual, body envelope violation, small-animals, and deterioration/disease. Regres- sion analyses revealed that disgust significantly predicted overall phobic symptoms even controlling for DS-R, negative affect and anxiety sensitivity. Further and more significant, based on regression analyses we found differential patterns of specific predictions between domains of disgust and types of phobic symptoms. The possible implications of these findings concerning differential relation- ships between kinds of disgust and kinds of phobic symptoms are discussed.

2316 – Relationship between kinds of disgust and psychiatric symptoms

Disgust has been characterized as a basic emotion, with unique physiological, behavioral and cognitive features. Although emotions have been a main subject of psychopathology over the last decades, disgust has recently been labelled as a “forgotten emotion” in psychiatry. The extant literature suggests that disgust seems to be implicated in the etiology and maintenance of specific phobias, in particular small-animal phobias and blood-injury phobia, and the obsessive-compulsive disorder. Likewise, recent research has demonstrated significant associations between disgust and anxiety disorder symptoms. However, there is a growing awareness in clinical psychology that most psychological disorder could be related to disgust experiences. The present study examines the relationships between disgust and a broad range of psychopathological symptoms controlling for general risk factors of anxiety disorders (i.e., anxiety sensitivity and negative affectivity). A large sample of undergraduates completed the Multidimensional Disgust Scale (see Sandin et al.), the Symptom Assessment-45 Questionnaire (Davison et al., 1997; Sandin et al., 2008), the Anxiety Sensitivity Index-3 (Taylor et al., 2007) and the PANAS (Watson et al., 1988, Sandín et al., 1999). Significant positive correlations were found between disgust and various psychopathological symptoms, including symptoms of anxiety, interpersonal sensitivity, obsession-compulsion, depression, paranoid ideation, and other psychopathological symptoms. Hierarchic regression analyses revealed that kinds of disgust were able to differentially predict various types of psychopathological symptoms. These links were not removed when controlling for anxiety sensitivity and neuroticism. Results support the view that different forms of disgust seem relevant for various symptoms of psychopathology.

The Bloodstain: Spirit Possession, Menstruation, and Transgression in Niger

Examining the varied reactions of people to the blood-stained wrapper of a spirit devotee during a bori possession ceremony in Niger, I explore how dirt and disgust are more complex than neat structuralist models of purity and pollution often used to explain them. Understanding menstrual blood in situational terms, and looking at the reactions as shaped more about complex dimensions of agency in the course of possession, secrecy, revealing things known but not spoken, and forms of attention allows us to grasp better the varied kinds of disgust some people expressed after the incident.

Core, animal reminder, and contamination disgust: Three kinds of disgust with distinct personality, behavioral, physiological, and clinical correlates

We examined the relationships between sensitivity to three kinds of disgust (core, animal-reminder, and contamination) and personality traits, behavioral avoidance, physiological responding, and anxiety disorder symptoms. Study 1 revealed that these disgusts are particularly associated with neuroticism and behavioral inhibition. Moreover, the three disgusts showed a theoretically consistent pattern of relations on four disgust-relevant behavioral avoidance tasks in Study 2. Similar results were found in Study 3 such that core disgust was significantly related to increased physiological responding during exposure to vomit, while animal-reminder disgust was specifically related to physiological responding during exposure to blood. Lastly, Study 4 revealed that each of the three disgusts showed a different pattern of relations with fear of contamination, fear of animals, and fear of blood–injury relevant stimuli. These findings provide support for the convergent and divergent validity of core, animal-reminder, and contamination disgust. These findings also highlight the possibility that the three kinds of disgust may manifest as a function of different psychological mechanisms (i.e., oral incorporation, mortality defense, disease avoidance) that may give rise to different clinical conditions. However, empirical examination of the mechanisms that underlie the three disgusts will require further refinement of the psychometric properties of the disgust scale.

Disgust and Huntington's disease

The disproportionate impairment for the recognition of facial expressions of disgust in patients with Huntington's disease (HD) forms a double dissociation with the impaired recognition of fear that has been reported in amygdala patients. The dissociation has generated discussion regarding the potential existence of neural substrates dedicated to the recognition of facial signals of specific emotions. The aim of this study was to establish whether the impairment for disgust in HD was restricted solely to the domain of facial perception, or whether HD patients also demonstrate impairment in other kinds of disgust. Fourteen HD patients and fourteen age and education matched healthy controls participated in seven disparate emotion processing tasks. (1) A measure of knowledge for the situational determinants of distinct emotions; (2) recognition of emotion expressed in nonverbal vocalisations; (3) recognition of the emotional content of explicit lexical stimuli; (4) recognition of emotional content in pictures of emotion scenes; (5) a disgust experience questionnaire; (6) a measure of olfactory hedonic responsiveness; (7) a measure of gustatory perception. While verbal aspects of disgust processing were preserved, parallel impairments were revealed for olfactory disgust, vocal disgust expressions, the classification of disgusting pictures, and declarative knowledge of disgust elicitors. The finding of impaired perception of disgust signalled through different input domains suggests that the inability to recognise the facial expression in this population reflects a fundamental problem with disgust processing.