Feelings of disgust may have effects on one’s moral judgment; specifically that experience of disgust has linked to increased severity of moral judgments. Additionally, one’s political beliefs may also affect one’s moral judgment, such as conservatives tend to make harsher judgment toward moral situations and behaviors. A 2 x 2 x 2 factorial quasi-experiment has been proposed to study 420 participants, legal adults from both conservative and liberal neighborhoods, randomly assigned to one of two conditions, disgust-eliciting versus neutral. Participants will view either four disgust-eliciting photographs or four neutral photographs, and then complete survey questions on disgust rating, moral judgment, disgust sensitivity, and political self-identification. It is hypothesized that, participants who identify as liberals, will feel less disgusted by the photos than conservative participants, and have more lenient moral judgment, whereas participants who identify as conservatives, will feel more disgusted by the photos than liberals, and have much harsher moral judgment.

The main objective of this thesis was to investigate the proposition that moral emotions act as antecedents of political attitudes. My approach (Chapter 1) stems from moral foundations theory, which proposes that liberals and conservatives have different moral values (Graham, Haidt, & Nosek, 2009). Chapter 2 presents Study 1, an experimental test of the hypothesis that induced disgust leads participants to adopt more left-wing economic attitudes in comparison to a control condition (sadness). Results supported this hypothesis. Chapter 3 reviews emotion-regulation theories, and presents Study 2, which investigated whether emotion-regulation strategies, disgust sensitivity (DS-R), and private body consciousness (PBC) moderate the effects found in Study 1. As predicted, disgust led to more left-wing economic attitudes, but this was only the case for high-PBC and high-DS-R participants. Chapter 4 presents Study 3, which replicated Study 2, and showed dissociations between the effects of disgust on economic and social attitudes. Chapter 5 presents a cross-sectional investigation (Study 4) that tested for associations between the predisposition to experience disgust and both social and economic attitudes. As predicted, core disgust and pathogen disgust were associated with left-wing economic attitudes and these effects applied only to British participants, and not non-British participants. Chapter 6 presents Study 5 – an experiment investigating the relationship between disgust and prejudiced attitudes towards outgroups. Induced disgust led to more prejudiced attitudes towards a novel group than both sadness and neutral emotion. Chapter 7 is focused on two self-conscious moral emotions: guilt and shame. Study 6, presented in this chapter, found a positive association between guilt proneness and left-wing economic attitudes, and a relationship between shame proneness and social-conservative attitudes. Study 7 failed to reveal causal relationships between incidental guilt and shame and political attitudes. Chapter 8 presents the general discussion addressing limitations, implications, and future research directions.

This paper tests Reiss' (1991) expectancy theory of fearfulness. Reiss' moderation model of fears speculates that individual differences in fearfulness and phobic avoidance is a function of the interaction between trait vulnerabilities (i.e., sensitivities) and beliefs about potential outcomes during exposure to phobic stimuli (i.e., expectancies). Four hundred and forty-five undergraduates completed questionnaires related to Reiss' fundamental sensitivities (e.g., "anxiety sensitivity"), expectancies (e.g., "expectancy of physical injury or harm") and the intensity of common fears. Informed by findings concerning fear-related outcome expectancies, a system for measuring expectancies was developed for this study called the Focus of Apprehension Survey Schedule (FASS). Additionally, "disgust sensitivity" and "expectancy of contamination or illness" were included to examine whether they account for fearfulness beyond that predicted by Reiss' sensitivities and expectancies alone. In Experiment 1, hierarchical multivariate regression was employed to test Reiss' moderation model of expectancy theory for four fear subtypes (animal, blood/injection/injury (BII), claustrophobic, social). For each of these fear types, results did not support Reiss' moderation model. However, disgust sensitivity improved the prediction of animal fears and contamination expectancies improved the prediction of BII fears beyond Reiss' fundamental sensitivities and expectancies alone. In Experiment 2, a competing mediation model of expectancy theory was tested in which sensitivities were expected to indirectly influence individual differences in fearfulness through outcome expectancies. Results of path analysis using LISREL 8.54 did not support a mediation model per se. However, expectancies were found to mediate relationships between sensitivities and fears in several predicted instances (e.g., contamination expectancies mediated the disgust-BII fears relationship). The results provide some encouraging replications of prior studies and are discussed in the context of implications for theories of fear as well as for future directions in research.

Lorsque l’on s’intéresse au dégoût comme forme d’affect, on remarque que son application abonde au niveau des études cinématographiques et des arts visuels. Par contre, peu de chercheurs se sont intéressés à son analyse à travers les médias dont l’institutionnalisation académique est plus récente, comme la bande dessinée, la télésérie et le jeu vidéo. Ce mémoire a pour objectif d’étendre la pratique des études du dégoût comme affect sur ces médias, en s’attardant sur l’analyse de certaines composantes de la franchise transmédiatique The Walking Dead. De plus, comme ce corpus est marqué par une transmédialité qui dépasse les simples récurrences narratives, ce mémoire veut également produire un modèle d’analyse capable de déceler les structures génératives du dégoût qui tendent à migrer ou être partagées entre les médias de la franchise. Ce modèle sera conçu dans un premier temps par l’établissement d’un dialogue entre les études de l’affect appliquées au cinéma et aux arts visuels et les études sur l’intermédialité. La fonctionnalité de ce modèle sera ensuite testée à travers son application sur la bande dessinée, la télésérie et l’un des jeux vidéo de la franchise The Walking Dead. / When we seek for works that focus on disgust as a form of affect, we note that its application abounds in film and visual art studies. However, few researchers dedicated its analysis through media whose academic institutionalization is newer, such as comics, TV series, and video games. This thesis aims to extend the studies of disgust as an affect’s practice on these media, focusing on the analysis of certain components from the transmedia franchise The Walking Dead. Moreover, because this body of media is marked by a transmediality that exceeds simple narrative recurrences, this thesis also wants to produce an analytical model capable of detecting disgust’s generative structures that tend to migrate or be shared between the media of the franchise. This model will be developed initially by the establishment of a dialogue between affect studies applied to cinema and visual arts, and intermedial studies. Then, this model’s functionality will be tested through its application within the comics, the television series and one of the video games of The Walking Dead franchise.

The aim of this diploma thesis is to introduce the notion of ugliness as an aesthetic category, concerning the question of its position in the aesthetic experience, based in particular on the conception of difficult beauty by Bernard Bosanquet. The first part of the thesis discusses the possibility of aesthetic experiencing of unpleasantness and so specifies ugliness as inherently aesthetic category, in comparison to the unaesthetic response of disgust. The second part of the thesis deals with the question of position of ugliness and the feeling of unpleasantness if ugliness is an adequate part of the aesthetic experience which is regarded as excellent and contributing. The solution offered by Bosanquet in his conception of difficult beauty however isn't fully sufficient and therefore the last chapter introduces the problem of ugliness from a different viewpoint which emphasizes the negativity and disturbance of ugliness, impossible to dissolve. The key feature of ugliness is the ambivalent link amongst the repulsion and the attraction in aesthetic experiencing. The attribution of a meaning in the whole of the aesthetic experience, i.e. the possibility of attaining new insight thanks to ugliness, may however lead to a tendency to the reconciliation of ugliness. The original unpleasantness and...

A phenomenon explored in the field of the cognitive neuroscience of morality is moral sensitivity, which is a collective name for a subjective experience related to the ability to detect and respond to morally relevant cues in a given social situation. This thesis will review the underlying neural mechanisms of moral sensitivity and three key components: Empathy, moral disgust and moral intuition, also called moral “gut-feeling.” Initially, the thesis provides a basic explanation of what moral sensitivity entails and the primary observations of which brain regions are often associated with moral sensitivity. Studies show that emotion and cognition seem to be essential to the experience of moral sensitivity, which will be further emphasized by reviewing the chosen key components. Research on morality and empathy suggests that the affective and the cognitive components of empathy each are essential to moral sensitivity. The second key component, moral disgust, describes how moral sensitive people react to violations to society by being motivated to keep away from social interactions with poor moral influence. Research on the third key component explains how moral sensitivity can be affected by moral intuitions, here moral “gut-feelings,” depending on the closeness and emotional salience in a given situation.

In the current project, I examined the distinct elicitors and behavioral outcomes of anti-gay anger and anti-gay disgust. The CAD triad hypothesis (Rozin, Lower, Imada, & Haidt, 1999) suggests that anger and disgust are elicited by distinct moral violations and cognitive appraisals. A plethora of research has documented the strong link between disgust and sexual prejudice, but very little attention has been given to the role of anger in sexual prejudice. The biocultural framework of stigmatization (Neuberg, Smith, & Asher, 2000) suggests that people who counter-socialize against prevailing social norms are stigmatized by others. If homosexual sexual behavior does not elicit anti-gay anger (Giner-Sorrolla, Bosson, Caswell & Hettinger, 2012), then anti-gay anger might be elicited by promoting positive views of homosexuality. In Study 1, participants were induced to feel anger, disgust, or no emotion and then rated one of two gay male target groups. I expected that cognitive appraisals of morality violation would increase when the emotional state was congruent with the perceived threat posed by the target, but the emotion induction failed to elicit differences in cognitive appraisals. The results of Study 2, collected from a non-student sample, were also inconsistent with my hypothesis. Sexually explicit behavior did not elicit disgust, and behavior which resulted in more tolerant attitudes toward homosexuality failed to elicit anger and harm appraisals. These results suggest that sexual prejudice research requires stricter experimental control than online data collection methods currently allow.

Ever since the birth of the film medium, stories about drugs and addiction have been produced. There is a fascination with the lifestyle, the effects of drugs and the ways in which it can be portrayed on the screen. The thesis starts off by giving an historical context, ranging from the late 19th Century and up until today, describing how the society and the public have treated the subject and how the narrative mirrors these attitudes. The purpose of the thesis is to take a closer look at this recurrent theme. Eleven fictional films produced between the 1980’s and 2000’s have been chosen and psychoanalytical film theory is used to analyze the ways in which the addict is represented; how filmic disgust and the abject makes the characters tread over physical and social boundaries and how the effect of the drug have the character tread over mental boundaries through dreams and hallucinations.

The goal of this dissertation was to evaluate proximate mechanisms that facilitate incest avoidance, and elucidate under what circumstances these mechanisms may fail, integrating insights from the fields of forensic and evolutionary psychology. To set the stage, Study 1 was a meta-analysis that examined differences between biological and sociolegal incest offenders on two major risk dimensions (antisociality and atypical interests). While sociolegal incest offenders were more problematic on some indicators of antisociality, these groups did not differ in atypical sexual interests. These findings suggest that current models of child sexual abuse may not be sufficient to fully explain incest offending. Studies 2 and 3 examined the viability of the Westermarck hypothesis (1891/1921) - that early physical proximity leads to incest avoidance - and the mediating role of disgust in father-daughter (Study 2) and brother-sister (Study 3) relationships. The primary hypothesis for these studies was that disgust toward incest would mediate the relationship between physical proximity and incest propensity or behaviour. The results of Study 2 did not support the Westermarck hypothesis among fathers. While physical proximity may not activate incest avoidance in fathers, disgust toward incest may still be a proximate mechanism. The results of Study 3 were consistent with the Westermarck hypothesis and the mediating role of disgust as an incest avoidance mechanism among siblings, and also suggest that moderators, such as sexual behaviour that could result in offspring, could influence the strength of this mechanism. These findings suggest that mechanisms responsible for incest avoidance may be different for fathers and siblings.

abstract: Infectious diseases have been a major threat to survival throughout human history. Humans have developed a behavioral immune system to prevent infection by causing individuals to avoid people, food, and objects that could be contaminated. This current project investigates how ambient temperature affects the activation of this system. Because temperature is positively correlated with the prevalence of many deadly diseases, I predict that temperature moderates the behavioral immune system, such that a disease prime will have a stronger effect in a hot environment compared to a neutral environment and one's avoidant behaviors will be more extreme. Participants were placed in a hot room (M = 85F) or a neutral room (M = 77F) and shown a disease prime slide show or a neutral slide show. Disgust sensitivity and perceived vulnerability surveys were used to measure an increased perceived risk to disease. A taste test between a disgusting food item (gummy bugs) and a neutral food item (gummy animals) measured food avoidance. There was no significant avoidance of the gummy and no significant difference in ratings of disgust sensitivity or perceived vulnerability as a function of temperature conditions. There were no significant interactions between temperature and disease. The conclusion is that this study did not provide evidence that temperature moderates the effect of disease cues on behavior. / Dissertation/Thesis / M.A. Psychology 2012