Feces, vomit, urine, sexual fluids, mucus, spoiled food, fleas, cockroaches, flies, lice, rats, dirty objects, bodily mutilation, surgical operations, organs and blood, death (or decomposing corpses) infections, pus, incest, cannibalism and politicians. All these things disgust us.
Anthropologist Richard Shweder also proposes the following list of actions that could make us say, yuck, this is so goddamn wrong, and be disgusted, guilty, ashamed or outraged: masturbation, homosexuality, abstinence, polygamy, abortion, circumcision , corporal punishment, Islam, Christianity, Judaism, capitalism, democracy, burning flags, mini skirts, long hair, baldness, children sleeping in the same bed with parents, granting women the right to work and not allowing women the right to work. I almost forgot pedophilia, pornography, prostitution, zoophilia, begging and swearing.
Disgust all the way. In a relationship, it seems that there is no chance to safeguard it when the disgust occurs. Most flaws seem forgivable, but if one day, the habit of collecting the husband’s dirty socks and underwear begin to disgust you, be sure that is the beginning of the end. But disgust is not only linked to unpleasantly stimulating smell or visual senses, it can be generated by a variety of behaviors, from infidelity to personal habits such as nail biting or picking your nose or teeth. Or arranging the testicles inside your pants.
Before the plethora of articles on disgust, there were only a couple of definitions about it, one as it was drawn by Darwin in "In The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals" which says that disgust refers to something revolting. “Disgust is experienced primarily in relation to the sense of taste (either perceived or imagined), and secondarily to anything which causes a similar feeling by sense of smell, touch, or vision. Andras Angyal (1941) defined disgust as repulsion to the idea of incorporating an offensive object.
The fact is that most times, disgust is associated with a visceral response rather than morality, although there are few situations in which we declare our disgust vis-a-vis the political class, unusual sexual practices or massacres of other nations.
The insula is the main neural structure involved in the emotion of disgust and has been shown by several studies to be the main neural correlate of the feeling of disgust both in humans and in macaque monkeys. Stark and colleagues concluded in a 2007 study that both fear and disgust resulted in activations in the occipital cortex, prefrontal cortex and in the amygdala but the insula activation was only significantly correlated with ratings of disgust, pointing to a specific role of this brain structure in the processing of disgust.
OK, what would happen to someone who would have an affected insula? Logically speaking, this person would be unable to feel disgust. Calder (2000) and Adolphs (2003) showed that lesions on the anterior insula lead to deficits in the experience of disgust and recognizing facial expressions of disgust in others. How useful is the ability to experience disgust, from an adaptive point of view? Evolutionary psychology advances the idea that disgust is adaptive, but what is not adaptive to the evolutionists? Therefore, we feel disgusted with anything that might attack us or harm our physical and mental health. Nausea during pregnancy associated with a profound feeling of disgust to food odors is explained by an ancestral precaution to protect the body from rotten food or poisonous odors, which could endanger both mother and fetus.
From a physiological angle, as opposed to fear and anger, which are associated with a predominant response of the sympathetic system, and come with increased heart rate, disgust can produce specific answers in the parasympathetic system, such as low blood pressure, decreased heart rate and decreased skin conductance.
In terms of taxonomy, disgust has been on the list of basic emotions along with anger, fear, happiness, sadness and surprise as they were categorized by Eckman.
So, what is disgust? A visceral sense of disgust, reflected by the mirror neurons? Can we feel self-disgusted? Is it a defense mechanism? Or is it something deeper and exclusively human, such as moral disgust toward certain actions of our peers? However we define it, it is clear that disgust compels us to distance ourselves from an object, event or situation and can be characterized briefly as a rejection (Haidt, 2008). However, unlike other emotions that can be measured by an external observer, disgust is generally measured by self-reporting, based on our own value system, or physiological threshold of acceptance.
Yet, within the popular culture, disgust and disgusting acts are often associated with common sense frame, omitting the moral dimension of it. Etymologically speaking, the word comes from a Latin word which means taste. In this aspect, something disgusting amounts to something related to an immediate sense, with a wide range of synonyms which express about the same thing: aversion, nausea, horror, revulsion, loathing, repugnant, nasty. Or how bioethicist Leon Kass defined it disgust is “the wisdom of repulsion” (1997).
Wheatley and Haidt (2005) found for instance that hypnotic disgust makes moral judgments more severe. So how do we react to the disgust? In addition to facial expression, we chose to seem outraged, revolted, or repulsed. But could the emotional or behavioral response may be associated with disgust?
In philosophy, qualia is a term used to describe the subjective quality of a conscious experience, and comes from a Latin word meaning for "what sort" or "what kind".
„Qualia, the mental or feeling component of emotion, may be the most difficult to study. The qualia of disgust are often described as revulsion. In comparison to other emotions, the experience of disgust appears to be rather short in duration” (Scherer & Wallbott, 1994) unlike other emotions such as guilt, satisfaction, guilt or shame that are longer lasting and could be leading to chronicity. The intensity of disgust is generally short lived but intense, a chronic state of disgust could be leading to general weariness and possibly to heart problems.
Although the decoding of the emotional response of disgust is quasi universal, there are times when the taxonomy is more or less cross culturally applicable. What it seems disgusting to some, might not seem so to others. Just as the moral system can vary from one culture to another, so can vary our response to disgust, either visceral or moral. What seems to be acceptable in a society, e.g. self-flagellation, consumption of human flesh, incest (not to forget that in Africa 30-50% of marriages are consanguineous, and in the U.S., marriages between relatives were allowed until 1861), mutilation or body modification etc, it is considered taboo and unacceptable in another. Taboos are unwritten social laws and moral prohibitions, with a very strong social effect that seem to ordinate and "legislate" the taste of a community. While the violation of some taboos can lead to criminal penalties (incest would be an example), the violation of others only cause public disapproval or feelings of embarrassment or shame.
Although ideally the center of disgust has its cradle in the insula of all the homo sapiens sapiens, we are not uniformly disgusted. Disgust, therefore, goes hand in hand with the morality of a society, and this is often based on emotional predictors, which seem not to be universally valid. Doesn’t Donald Trump just disgust you? No, I don't mean his hair. His what?? No way!
