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Disgust

Most contemporary theorists assume that emotions have evolved because of the adaptive functions they provide to the individual experiencing them. Two of the key functions of emotions are first, to facilitate rapid responses toward potentially dangerous aspects of the environment, and second, to facilitate social interactions with other individuals. Disgust plays an important role in both respects: Although it was originally concerned with the avoidance of potentially harmful substances, it is also involved in the social enforcement of norms.

Disgust as a Basic Emotion

Theoretical debates continue regarding the existence of a fixed number of basic emotions; however, all proposed lists of basic emotions include disgust as one of them, usually together with happiness, sadness, anger, fear, and surprise. Disgust is considered to have evolved in the context of food consumption as an emotion that protects from various contaminants, such as spoiled food, bad taste, and unpleasant odors, in order to prevent ingestion of substances that may potentially be harmful. As is the case for other emotions, disgust involves a characteristic subjective experience, a facial expression, and some action tendencies. Because it is concerned with appetitive responses related to food consumption, a disgust response consists of literally moving offensive substances away from the self and can include expulsion of bad substances by spitting them out, or, if ingestion has already occurred, vomiting. The disgust facial expression involves the mouth gaping open, which facilitates food rejection and shutting down sensory intake of offensive smells by pulling up the nose and raising the upper lip. A subjective feeling of revulsion, and possibly nausea, accompanies this rejection response. In addition to the avoidance of toxins that might be ingested by mouth, disgust also guards against the touching of contaminated substances and of parasites and pathogens that might be harmful by contact, thus avoiding potential infection and disease.

Many emotions can be modified through cognitive reappraisal; that is, the subjective experience can be altered by cognitive strategies, such as giving a different interpretation to an emotion-eliciting stimulus. In contrast, feelings of disgust are relatively immune to cognitive reappraisal, with people finding it difficult to perceive a disgusting stimulus in a nondisgusting way. For example, because of preexisting associations with disgusting objects, most people will refuse to drink apple juice from a brand-new bedpan or eat chocolate fudge in the shape of dog feces. Further, people tend to engage in magical thinking with respect to disgusting objects and situations, such that perceived contamination is treated as if it were contagious, even if this is not objectively the case. In addition, objects are often considered to have some essence of contamination such that once something is disgusting, it remains so even after intensive cleansing efforts. A certain asymmetry exists such that any object can easily go from being clean to being contaminated, but the reverse is not true, because to some extent contamination is considered irreversible.

Types of Disgust

Three distinct types of disgust have been identified: first, core disgust; second, animal nature disgust; and third, sociomoral disgust. First, the most basic type of disgust, core disgust, describes the function of disgust that is linked to food and consumption, as described above. In addition, animal nature disgust describes people's emotional response of disgust and repulsion when reminded of the fact that human beings are phylogenetically similar to nonhuman animals. Consequently, physiological processes related to bodily functions, especially those related to bodily wastes and reproduction, are considered animal-like and therefore disgusting. A strong desire exists to view human beings as enjoying a special status among other creatures, and people go to great efforts to distinguish themselves from animals by implementation of social and cultural norms. When the boundaries between human beings and animals are blurred, people feel debased. Presumably, the main reason for the discomfort associated with reminders of human beings' animal nature is that they make salient the fact that, just like any other creature, every human being is mortal and will eventually die.

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