Attention bias for disgust
Section snippets
Attention bias for disgust
Darwin (1872/1965) described disgust as something offensive to the taste, and that its expression consists of movements in order to expel food from the mouth. The notion of oral incorporation stems from the recognition that the universal facial expression of disgust centers around the mouth, with the opening of the mouth and closing of the nares. This facial expression serves to prevent odor input and to reject food that is already in the mouth (Rozin & Fallon, 1987). While disgust has been
Participants
The participants were 60 undergraduate students at Fordham University. All participants received course credit. They included 38 females (63.3%) and 22 males (36.7%). They ranged in age from 18.1 to 24.5 years, with a mean age of 19.2 years (S.D.=.9 years). They included 2 Asians (3.3%), 45 Caucasians (75.0%), 10 Hispanics (16.7%), and 3 who described themselves as “other” (5.0%). Their religious affiliations were as follows: 45 considered themselves Catholic (75.0%); 2 considered themselves
Order effects
As indicated by an independent samples t test, there was no significant difference in response latencies of disgust related words between those subjects who were administered the surveys first (M=821.99 ms) and those subjects who were administered the Stroop Task first (M=862.31 ms), t(58)=1.53, P>.05. Therefore, there was no priming effect of the DSS to latency on disgust words of the Stroop Color-naming Task. Furthermore, this lack of order effect was evident across priming stories.
Attention bias and its relation to disgust sensitivity
There was an
Discussion
The finding that there was an attention bias towards disgust words across all subjects is contrary to the findings of Williams et al. (1996) which found no difference in the color-naming latency between threat and nonthreat words for control subjects. However, several points must be made in this regard. First, these results are contrary only if disgust is truly a defensive emotion. Second, and in support of the findings of Williams et al. (1996), there was no difference between the color-naming
Acknowledgements
This research formed the basis of a predoctoral research project conducted by Michael Charash. We would like to thank Paul Rozin for helpful comments on an earlier version of this manuscript.
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