Research Report“Ugh! That's disgusting!”: Identification of the characteristics of foods underlying rejections based on disgust
Section snippets
Overview of food-related disgust
Disgust has been considered to be a basic emotion since Darwin (Darwin, 1965, cited in Rozin, Haidt, & McCauley, 1993). It is currently recognized by emotion theorists as one of the six or seven “core” emotions (Lzard, C. E. (1991)., Rozin et al., 1993, Tomkins, S. (1963)). Like other basic emotions, disgust has a characteristic facial expression, a specific physiological state (nausea), a behavioral component (distancing of oneself from the offensive object), and a characteristic feeling state
Overview
We used multidimensional scaling (MDS), a statistical technique designed to identify the dimensions that best account for the similarity/dissimilarity among ratings of stimuli. These dimensions represent latent variables that influence the object ratings. In order to interpret these latent variables, we had another set of participants rate the stimuli on a variety of attributes, and we then regressed scores representing locations on the identified dimensions over the means (collapsed over
Participants
Participants were 23 male and 46 female (one participant did not report her/his gender) University of Toronto students between the ages of 18 and 40.
Food stimuli
The twenty-four scenarios, used in sample 1, served as the stimuli for this sample of participants as well.
Measures
To indicate their beliefs about the specific characteristics of the foods depicted in the 24 scenarios, participants rated each on 14, 7-point bipolar scales. The endpoints for these scales were:
- 1.
not at all slimy…extremely slimy
- 2.
reminds me of
Familiarity
Familiarity ratings of the animal and nonanimal foods made by participants in Sample 1, were calculated, collapsing across scenarios and participants. The animal foods received a mean familiarity rating of 4.84 and nonanimal foods received a mean familiarity rating of 4.92. These ratings of familiarity are a little lower than the ratings that familiar animal and nonanimal foods received in other studies (e.g. study 1, Martins and Pliner (in press) Manimal=6.76, Mnonanimal=6.83), but are much
Discussion
The purpose of this investigation was to identify the factors underlying disgust reactions to animal and nonanimal foods. After reviewing the disgust literature, we identified12 categories of potential disgust elicitors; participants in Sample 1 rated the foods in these scenarios on their disgustingness and other disgust attributes (i.e. oral incorporation and nausea) while participants in Sample 2 rated the foods in these scenarios on a variety of attributes that had the potential to be
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