Disgust

• Feelings: revulsion, nausea
• action tendency: distancing away, turn away, avoid, reject
• nausea –> discourages eating
• vomit –> undoes ingestion mistake

wrinkling of the nose, stops you from smelling it

• give a baby something new to taste they will make a face of disgust
• bitter substance on tongue –> disgust expression
• it a neurochemical response that causes this whole reaction
• primitive avoidance mechanism (or minimum cortical involvement)
• unsure if babies are feeling the emotion of disgust, we just know for sure they are making the facial expression

• core disgust
• elaborated disgust
• elaborated disgust cross-culturally

associated with bad food, begins with taste and smells

• Omnivores eat plant and meat
• sensation seeking vs. "neophobic" (afraid of the new)
• Sensation seeking try new things
• Non sensation seeking try new things less often

Advantages: flexibly not dependent on 1 food source Disadvantages: increase risk of consuming toxins

• Rejection of physically harmful objects
• Avoid contaminated food and water

• increase food disgust over animals and animal waste products
• may be an adaptation
• microbes and parasites bad for ppl (transmitted by physical contact with animals and their residues)
• disgust evolved to "contact history" (what is it? where has it been?)
• selective advantage for those concerned with contact history of things touched and eaten

• contagion: once in contact, always in contact (ex. clothes)
• similarity: objects similar in some properties are felt to be fundamentally similar (nurses)

Learned by 9-12 yrs that they are not okay to eat form their culture/exp

• core disgust elicited by food, animals, body products these elicitors are "contamination"
• oral defense
• may be evolutionary adaptation to microbial threats

reject social things and psychological things process for rejection of physically harmful objects usurped for rejection of psychological objects

• core disgust items (food, animals, body products)
• "deviant" sexual matters
• mutilation, bloody corpses ("forcible breach or alteration of exterior envelope")

• Theory (Haidt and Rozin)
• Disgust items remind us of our animal nature
• Have need to distinguish from animal nature
• problem: body reminds us we are animals (eat, excrete, bleed when cut)
• try to hide biological process (animalness) by defining specifically human ways to perform them
• every culture prescribes proper way to handle bodily fxns those who violate norms are reviled or shunned

• Fear of death and insignificance
• human culture – attempts to deny or repress this fear animals mortal –> we're animals –> we're mortal

• contamination sensitivity – avoid pollution and maintain purity in material world
• human societies need to reject many things – sexual and social deviants
• core disgust = rejection system – harnessed to other kinds of rejection
• extension of "disgust schema" to social world – avoid "evil and increase contact with "goodness"
• word "disgust" also used for socio-moral violations
• socio-moral disgust – metaphoric quirk of english?

across cultures: nausea and revulsion linked to core-disgust and social-moral disgust

• subjects: jap. vs US students
• DV: descriptions of 3 disgust-eliciting evens

• Results: Cultural similarities
• # (25%) and type of core disgust items (cockroach)
• # and type of animal-reminder disgust items (blood accidents)
• # sociocultural disgust items
• 61% of items in japan; 70% in US

• US:
• acts on senseless violence or cruelty (ex. mass murder)
• ugly or offensive beliefs and attitudes (racist attitudes)

• Japan:
• Social frustration; others fail to meet needs, or abuse or shame self (ex. criticized for my driving)
• self-failed to live up to standards (ex. failed exams)