I have recently got into disgust in a big way. People often look surprised when I tell them this, even bemused, but they're usually not a little intrigued at the same time. However, not only is disgust a legitimate area of serious academic research (well, that's what I tell my professor), but you can also have a lot of fun. Speaking of which, I'd like to thank Fay Murphy for suggesting the title of this piece.
Power and Dalgleish (1997) suggest that disgust, a generally underexplored emotion, may be the emotion of the 21st centuryรit is easy to elicit in the laboratory and it may not carry the same ethical implications as inducing sadness or anxiety. At the extreme end of disgust-eliciting stimuli, Laing has produced glorious technicolour pictures of charred bodies, severed hands and toilet bowls ยฎlled with vomit. At the less extreme end of the disgust-eliciting market, Paul Rozin has used pieces of fudge shaped like faeces in order to see how prepared people are to eat it (answer?รthey're not particularly keen).
But the fun doesn't stop there. I recently chatted with a professor of literature about how, in developing a questionnaire measuring disgust sensitivity, Haidt et al. (1994) had to drop the item `Wearing Hitler's sweater' because every respondent rated this as extremely disgusting, and it therefore showed no variance. We then designed a number of disgust-eliciting experiments in which we would present students with several pairs of underpants, apparently worn by various world leaders (e.g. Hitler, Mussolini, Churchill, Thatcher), and see which pair students would be most or least willing to wear. We have yet to write the formal grant application.
At its most basic level, disgust is an emotion based on distaste (Rozin and Fallon, 1987). The physiological response and facial expression of disgust are concerned with rejection of food that may be poisonous. Most people know how food aversions develop by forward conditioning (i.e. consumption of food followed by illness), but they can also develop via a directly cognitive route CCC 1072ยฑ4133/99/020150ยฑ03$17.50