On Disgust
These are insights derived from studying the emotion of disgust for the past 5 years, posted at the request of motel666.
Your one-stop book is William Ian Miller's The Anatomy of Disgust. In psychology, some of the preeminent researchers on the topic are Paul Rozin and Jon Haidt.
What is disgust, and what does it do for us?
* The basic emotion of disgust has a facial expression of wrinkled brows, stuck-out tongue, and turned-down mouth corners. This points to its origin in the animal reaction of distate - expelling something noxious from the mouth. But over evolutionary time, distaste was built upon, turned into an emotional reaction intended to protect the whole body from contagion -- an implicit germ theory. In this regard, only humans show disgust, and show it relatively late in development; if cats had disgust they would not clean themselves in the way they do, for example, and infants are notorious for playing with their own excrement until a certain age when it becomes repulsive to them.
* What creates basic disgust? This is complicated. Appraisal theories of emotion in psychology have a habit of summing up emotional triggers with catchy formulae like "anger = other person responsible for negative outcome." But disgust seems to be triggered by very basic stimuli, which after much thought I can sum up as "things involving the body that we are not used to," though this still seems to fall short. Most disgust falls into the categories: 1) unfamiliar food items (and animal foods are more disgusting than vegetable, perhaps because they involve two bodies!) 2) bodily fluids and products in general (including sex) 3) the dead, diseased or otherwise unnatural body, regardless of whether the death or disease was scientifically contagious or not.
There is also speculation but little real evidence that disgust also applies to extreme examples of moral evil, for example, Naziism or Satanism. It is interesting that these examples also contain their own body-related elements - the abominations of Dr. Mengele, the use of the naked body as an altar. Can moral disgust exist without these things?
* We can see that disgust guards against contagion because it follows the "magical" laws of contagion as laid down by Claude Levi-Strauss in his studies of anthropology. Carol Nemeroff did a series of studies with Paul Rozin showing this; for example, people are still disgusted by a sweater worn by someone who died of cancer, and unwilling to wear it. The playground concept of "cooties" is disgust-contagion in its most primitive extreme, and points to the ways in which ...
* Disgust can be metaphorized as social contempt. The emotion was used, for example, by Nazi propaganda against Jews, comparing them to disease and to disease-bearing animals. As compared to fear or anger, this is a good way to agitate against a social group without having to point to a specific injustice or threat of theirs. Merely being strange - having foods, bodily or sexual customs that are not "ours" - is enough.
* One thing needs to be cleared up before continuing; in the English language "disgust" is often used as a synonym for "anger" (You stole from me and I'm really disgusted). This has been interpreted as evidence for a moral variety of disgust, but my own research shows that when a scenario is not actually physically disgusting, "disgust" terms are more related to endorsement of anger faces showing how a person feels, than disgust faces. In other words, this is a use of the term "disgust" that has little bearing on the actual basic emotion.
* Disgust is irrational. Consider the example, used by Haidt in his studies, of a chocolate shaped like a dog-doo. Even though we know it is chocolate, it is still disgusting, and no amount of rationality will convince us otherwise.
* In spite of being bodily, in spite of being irrational -- or perhaps because of both! -- disgust is a strongly socialized emotion. There are some things that appear to be disgusting across cultures; feces, vomit, disease products, dead bodies. Whether these are innately disgusting or disgusting via strong universal socialization is unclear yet, awaiting that highly unethical "wild boy" experiment. Yet move away from these, and foods, sexual practices, body modification practices, physical contact norms vary widely in their disgustingness from culture to culture. Sharing disgust can be a way to bond socially, as children do when they giggle at gross jokes; overcoming disgust can be an initiatory ritual moving one to adulthood, as in sexual initation or the first beer; overcoming disgust can also be an anti- or sub-social act, proclaiming one's individuality. This apparent paradox arises from disgust's being both an irrational and a human emotion. By accepting disgust you demonstrate your status as a human and member of your culture; by overcoming it, you demonstrate your willingness to transcend culture and childhood.
Hope this has been informative!
Your one-stop book is William Ian Miller's The Anatomy of Disgust. In psychology, some of the preeminent researchers on the topic are Paul Rozin and Jon Haidt.
What is disgust, and what does it do for us?
* The basic emotion of disgust has a facial expression of wrinkled brows, stuck-out tongue, and turned-down mouth corners. This points to its origin in the animal reaction of distate - expelling something noxious from the mouth. But over evolutionary time, distaste was built upon, turned into an emotional reaction intended to protect the whole body from contagion -- an implicit germ theory. In this regard, only humans show disgust, and show it relatively late in development; if cats had disgust they would not clean themselves in the way they do, for example, and infants are notorious for playing with their own excrement until a certain age when it becomes repulsive to them.
* What creates basic disgust? This is complicated. Appraisal theories of emotion in psychology have a habit of summing up emotional triggers with catchy formulae like "anger = other person responsible for negative outcome." But disgust seems to be triggered by very basic stimuli, which after much thought I can sum up as "things involving the body that we are not used to," though this still seems to fall short. Most disgust falls into the categories: 1) unfamiliar food items (and animal foods are more disgusting than vegetable, perhaps because they involve two bodies!) 2) bodily fluids and products in general (including sex) 3) the dead, diseased or otherwise unnatural body, regardless of whether the death or disease was scientifically contagious or not.
There is also speculation but little real evidence that disgust also applies to extreme examples of moral evil, for example, Naziism or Satanism. It is interesting that these examples also contain their own body-related elements - the abominations of Dr. Mengele, the use of the naked body as an altar. Can moral disgust exist without these things?
* We can see that disgust guards against contagion because it follows the "magical" laws of contagion as laid down by Claude Levi-Strauss in his studies of anthropology. Carol Nemeroff did a series of studies with Paul Rozin showing this; for example, people are still disgusted by a sweater worn by someone who died of cancer, and unwilling to wear it. The playground concept of "cooties" is disgust-contagion in its most primitive extreme, and points to the ways in which ...
* Disgust can be metaphorized as social contempt. The emotion was used, for example, by Nazi propaganda against Jews, comparing them to disease and to disease-bearing animals. As compared to fear or anger, this is a good way to agitate against a social group without having to point to a specific injustice or threat of theirs. Merely being strange - having foods, bodily or sexual customs that are not "ours" - is enough.
* One thing needs to be cleared up before continuing; in the English language "disgust" is often used as a synonym for "anger" (You stole from me and I'm really disgusted). This has been interpreted as evidence for a moral variety of disgust, but my own research shows that when a scenario is not actually physically disgusting, "disgust" terms are more related to endorsement of anger faces showing how a person feels, than disgust faces. In other words, this is a use of the term "disgust" that has little bearing on the actual basic emotion.
* Disgust is irrational. Consider the example, used by Haidt in his studies, of a chocolate shaped like a dog-doo. Even though we know it is chocolate, it is still disgusting, and no amount of rationality will convince us otherwise.
* In spite of being bodily, in spite of being irrational -- or perhaps because of both! -- disgust is a strongly socialized emotion. There are some things that appear to be disgusting across cultures; feces, vomit, disease products, dead bodies. Whether these are innately disgusting or disgusting via strong universal socialization is unclear yet, awaiting that highly unethical "wild boy" experiment. Yet move away from these, and foods, sexual practices, body modification practices, physical contact norms vary widely in their disgustingness from culture to culture. Sharing disgust can be a way to bond socially, as children do when they giggle at gross jokes; overcoming disgust can be an initiatory ritual moving one to adulthood, as in sexual initation or the first beer; overcoming disgust can also be an anti- or sub-social act, proclaiming one's individuality. This apparent paradox arises from disgust's being both an irrational and a human emotion. By accepting disgust you demonstrate your status as a human and member of your culture; by overcoming it, you demonstrate your willingness to transcend culture and childhood.
Hope this has been informative!