Unique affective and cognitive processes in contamination appraisals: Implications for contamination fear

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Abstract

A large body of evidence suggests an important role of disgust in contamination fear (CF). A separate line of research implicates various cognitive mechanisms in contamination fear, including obsessive beliefs, memory biases, and delayed attentional disengagement from threat. This study is an initial attempt to integrate these two lines of research and examines whether disgust and delayed attention disengagement from threat explain unique or overlapping processes within CF. Non-clinical undergraduate students (N = 108) completed a spatial cueing task, which provided measures of delayed disengagement from frightening and disgusting cues, and a self-report measure of disgust propensity (DP). Participants also completed a chain of contagion task, in which they provided contamination appraisals of an object as a function of degrees of removal from an initial contaminant. Results demonstrated that DP predicted greater initial contamination appraisals, but a sharper decline in estimations across further degrees of removal from the contaminant. Delayed disengagement from disgust cues uniquely predicted sustained elevations in contamination estimations across further degrees of removal from the contaminant. These results suggest that DP and delayed disengagement from disgust cues explain unique and complimentary processes in contamination appraisals, which suggests the utility of incorporating the disparate affective and cognitive lines of research on CF.

Research highlights

▶ Individual differences in disgust propensity predicted greater contamination appraisals of objects that have been directly contaminated. Individual differences in the ability to disengage attention from disgust cues predicted greater contamination appraisals of objects with only distal and indirect contact with the initial contaminant. These results suggest that affective and cognitive mechanisms may play unique, but complimentary, roles in mediating contamination fear.

Section snippets

Participants

108 non-clinical participants (85 females) were recruited from undergraduate courses. Mean age was 19.3 (SD = 1.2) and 85% were Caucasian. This initial study with a non-clinical sample will provide justification for future research with clinical samples.

Spatial cueing task

The spatial cueing task presents two empty boxes on the right and left of a central fixation cross. A cue (i.e., stimulus picture) is displayed in one of the boxes for either 100 or 500 ms. The cue then disappears and either a ‘/’ or ‘X’ probe is

RT data preparation

RT data were cleaned by first removing errors, then removing RTs that were 2.5 standard deviations or more above the individual's mean or less than 200 ms (e.g., Fox et al., 2001, Koster et al., 2006). Three participants’ RT data were removed from analyses due to excessively elevated mean RTs (i.e., greater than 3 SDs above sample mean). The number of RT data removed was low (i.e., on average, analyses were run on 95% of participant's RT data).

Descriptive statistics

Table 1 presents descriptive data on the study

Discussion

Results of the present study suggested that DP and delayed disengagement from disgust at 500 ms explained unique aspects of the chain of contagion task. Higher DP predicted elevated initial contamination appraisals (i.e., the intercept), but also predicted a greater decline in appraisals across the pencils (i.e., the linear slope) that occurred at a faster rate (i.e., the quadratic slope). By contrast, delayed disengagement from disgust cues at 500 ms only predicted sustained elevations across

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