Is Disgust a Homogeneous Emotion?

Social justifications for moral emotions: When reasons for disgust are less elaborated than for anger.

“…Moral anger is associated with concerns about harm and others' rights (Haidt, 2003), as well as with whether justice has been served (Goldberg, Lerner, & Tetlock, 1999) and whether one has acted responsibly (Averill, 1983). While the elicitors of core disgust in non-moral situation appear to largely serve as cues to contagious disease; somewhat different elicitors of disgust apply in moral contexts (Marzillier & Davey, 2004;Simpson, Carter, Anthony, & Overton, 2006). Rozin, Haidt and McCauley (1993) argue that socio-moral disgust functions to preserve social order, and can be elicited by many different persons or groups, once they are seen to have done something morally wrong.…”

On Disgust and Moral Judgments: A Review

“…Although previous work proposed that both types of transgressions are similar to each other, there are studies that suggest the existence of important differences between the two. In terms of similarity, the way people experience moral and physical disgust is sufficiently akin that they will describe both kinds of stimuli as ' disgusting' (e.g., Simpson et al, 2006) and pair them both with facial signs of disgust that indicate a bad taste or smell (e.g., Chapman et al, 2009;Gutierrez, Giner-Sorolla, & Vasiljevic, 2012). Furthermore, both moral and physical disgust trigger shared features of the classical disgust expression (e.g., Cannon et al, 2011;Chapman et al, 2009).…”

“…In terms of differences, moral disgust occurs frequently along with other negative emotions, whereas physical disgust is more often evoked on its own (Simpson et al, 2006). Furthermore, the aforementioned neuro-scientific studies also suggest some differences between the two types of disgust.…”

“…Nevertheless, these studies have an important limitation; namely the use of verbal self-reports that I discuss in the next section. Regardless, other studies (e.g., Hutcherson & Gross, 2011;Simpson et al, 2006) suggest that pure transgressions trigger a joint occurrence between self-reported disgust and self-reported anger. However, others (e.g., Cannon et al, 2001;Chapman et al, 2009, Ugazio et al, 2012 suggest that disgust can actually be differentiated from anger.…”

“…Participants were shown images containing physically disgusting elicitors (e.g., cockroaches, an infected wound) or pure moral transgressions (e.g., political hypocrisy, racial violence) along with a written description of each image. Although the physically disgusting elicitors evoked a higher level of disgust than anger, the findings suggested powerful and almost equal ratings of both disgust and anger towards the images containing pure (i.e., moral) transgressions (Simpson et al, 2006). Chapman et al (2009) examined the influence of disgust on participants' behavior during the ultimatum game (UG) paradigm.…”