Disgust in humor: Its appeal to adolescents

Abstract

Respondents were exposed to humorous episodes devoid ofdisgust, involving some degree ofdisgust, or involving highly disgusting events. Highly disgust· sensitive respondents were less amused by the humorous materiell, taken together, than were their less squeamish counterparts. In contrast, highly rebellious respondents tended to be more amused by these materials than were respondents exhibiting comparatively little trait rebelliousness. Pronounced gender differences in reacting to disgusting humor emerged. Compared with males, females rated humorous episodes less amusing, the more disgust they involved. Additionally, compared with females, males facially expressed more amusement in response to the humorous episodes the more disgust they involved.

Disgust sensitivity and meat consumption: a test of an emotivist account of moral vegetarianism

“…Baghurst, 1999;Smit, Nieto, Crespo, & Mitchell, 1999). Likewise, our findings that (a) women are more disgust sensitive than men, and (b) disgust sensitivity decreases with age replicate previous studies which used smaller samples and in person administration of the D-Scale (Haidt et al, 1994;Koukounas & McCabe, 1997;Oppliger & Zillmann, 1997;Quigley et al, 1997).…”

“…Among Western vegetarians, women greatly outnumber men (Beardsworth & Bryman, 1999;Neumark-Sztainer, Story, Resnick, & Blum, 1997;Worsley & Skrzypiec, 1998), and even nonvegetarian Western women eat considerably less meat than men as a proportion of the diet (Beardsworth & Bryman, 1999;Fraser, Welch, Luben, Bingham, & Day, 2000;Perl, Mandic, Primorac, Klapec, & Perl, 1998;Richardson, Shepherd, & Elliman, 1993). Correspondingly, in the US, Japan, Indonesia, and the Netherlands women and girls exhibit lower thresholds for the elicitation of disgust (Druschel & Sherman, 1999;Haidt et al, 1994;Koukounas & McCabe, 1997;Oppliger & Zillmann, 1997;Quigley, Sherman, & Sherman, 1997; first author's field notes; J. Haidt personal communication).…”

The psychophysiology of mixed emotional states

“…We here draw on amusement and disgust because these two emotional states are often used as representatives of positive and negative emotions (Davidson, Ekman, Saron, Senulis, & Friesen, 1990;Demaree, Schmeichel, Robinson, & Everhart, 2004) and because they naturally co-occur in everyday life (Hemenover & Schimmack, 2007;Oppliger & Zillmann, 1997). Given that different emotion elicitation paradigms may impose different information processing demands that can significantly influence the physiological emotion response, we here focus on emotion elicitation through passive perception of pictures, sounds, or film clips.…”

“…Second, we studied a mixed emotional state of amusement and disgust because prior research has demonstrated reliable co-occurrence of this pair of emotions (Hemenover & Schimmack, 2007;Oppliger & Zillmann, 1997) and extensively studied the psychophysiology of the constituent emotions (Britton et al, 2006;Demaree et al, 2004), often as representatives for positive and negative emotions (Davidson et al, 1990). Still, future research will need to address whether inferences drawn from the herestudied mixed emotional state generalize to other forms of both different-and same-valence mixed emotions (Harter & Buddin, 1987).…”

Cognitive and emotional demands of black humour processing: the role of intelligence, aggressiveness and mood

“…Whilst fit and surprise were positively related to preference, cruelty (‘How vicious or cruel is the emotional tone of the joke towards an individual or group?’) was negatively related to preference. Other studies about sick humour showed that subjects who prefer such humour are more likely to be male (Herzog and Anderson 2000; Herzog and Karafa 1998; Oppliger and Zillmann 1997), more likely to be rebellious (Oppliger and Zillmann 1997) and are more capable to treat sick humour as playful fiction (Mindess et al 1985). …”