No description available.

During Augustine’s early years in ministry, he promoted the idea of using the pen rather than the sword when it comes to converting those who were not Christians. However, during the Donatist Controversy. Augustine advocated the use of violence to convince the Donatists to return to the Catholic fold. This dissertation argues that disgust played a crucial role in Augustine’s change of heart. Emotions play a huge part in an individual’s decision-making process. Studies on disgust discuss its role in interpersonal conflict and in religious violence. The dehumanizing language present in Augustine's letters when he describes the Donatists helps create an atmosphere where disgust's strong presence can be felt. The question of purity became an important question since both groups argued that they were the “true, pure Church.” Both groups traced their spiritual lineage to Cyprian as proof that they belonged to the true African Church. By examining Augustine's Letters, one can see the shift in tone and characterization of the Donatists by Augustine. Over the years, the disgust felt by Augustine led to a shift in his attitude, leading him to sanction the use of violence against the Donatists. Initially, the role of disgust was to prevent humans from coming into contact with harmful pathogens. As a result, humans developed a strong revulsion against harmful substances in order to protect themselves from harm. While disgust has this physical component, it also has a sociomoral component where it manifests itself against disgusting stimulus. Within this schema, anything that it deems as a moral transgression, especially as it involves question of purity, is considered as a stimulus to be avoided and rejected strongly and vehemently. While it poses no problem for a human to avoid what it deems as a disgusting stimulus such as a cockroach, it does pose a problem when another human being is seen and labelled as a cockroach. Disgust has the power to “other” human beings and creates a very strong us-vs-them mentality. Once this us-vs-them mentality is enforced, it is only natural to label another group as a "cockroach” and kill them as such. In examining Augustine's relationship with the Donatists, it is important to acknowledge disgust’s role in this particular theological and historical event. This dissertation will conclude with a contemporary application of disgust in modern theological controversies, especially as it relates to homosexuality and the role of women in leadership. Disgust’s ability to elicit such a strong and violent response in humans is a reminder of the strength of emotions to govern our actions. / Thesis / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Why do we behave the way we do? Can behaviour be modified? This thesis explores these questions by looking at behavioural and neuropsychology and how we control two basic emotions: fear and disgust. As this thesis will demonstrate, these two emotions compel us to avoid danger and go to extreme lengths to keep "safe." Using leprosy as its first case study, it tracks the evolution of more positive attitudes towards people with leprosy. It explores what life was like in Western Europe's 11th to 13th centuries. It juxtaposes those positive attitudes against later negative attitudes. It examines the stigmatization of diseases and disabilities, asking what fear and disgust are and how they affect human behaviour. This sets the stage for discussing HIV/AIDS, compared to leprosy, to demonstrate similar behaviour. The focal point of attitudes towards leprosy and HIV/AIDS is behavioural conditioning, a technique for retraining the brain to reinterpret a stimulus to mean something else. This thesis argues that this method can reduce fear, disgust, and stigma in most attitudes and behaviours about diseases and disabilities.

This thesis is an exploration of liminal teen agency in Heather O’Neill’s Lullabies for Little Criminals and Raziel Reid’s When Everything Feels Like the Movies. By focusing on two teen characters from working class families, one female, one queer, I investigate how teens assert their autonomy while still living under the constraints of classism and (hetero)sexism. While these teens are able to retain some form of autonomy, I argue that their agency is often obscured or overwritten by the disgust reactions of other characters in each novel. Drawing on affect theory, particularly Sara Ahmed’s body of work, Jonathan Dollimore, and Sianne Ngai, and drawing on Joan Sangster’s work on the construction of female delinquency, I investigate the significance of the disgust reaction, and how the reaction is a means of reasserting power over the willful, resistant teen body. As the Canada Reads competition reveals, the middle class, cis-hetero readerly discomfort with these novels becomes an avenue through which this literature is deemed “unpalatable,” providing a justification to doubt the testimony of narrators like Baby and Jude. This thesis is ultimately an intervention into doubted testimony, and demonstrates how affective disgust is the source of doubt. Since agency and testimony are tightly intertwined in each novel, doubting testimony becomes a violent form of denying these characters, and the authors, agency. / Thesis / Master of Arts (MA)

The Hygiene Hypothesis and Old Friends Hypothesis focus attention on the coevolutionary relationship between humans and pathogens, positing that reduced pathogen exposure in economically developed nations is responsible for immune dysregulation and associated increases in chronic inflammation, allergy, and autoimmunity. Despite progress in testing these ideas, few studies have examined these relationships among populations undergoing the transition from traditional to more market-based lifestyles. The present study tests relationships between economic development and social change, altered infectious disease exposure, and immune function among the Shuar forager-horticulturalists of Amazonian Ecuador, a population undergoing rapid economic change associated with increased market participation. Using stool samples to assess soil-transmitted helminth (STHs; parasitic intestinal worms) burden, dried blood spot measurement of the inflammatory marker C-reactive protein (CRP), and interviews to evaluate level of market integration (MI; the suite of social and cultural changes associated with rapid economic development) and disgust sensitivity, this dissertation tests the Hygiene and Old Friends Hypotheses. The first study tests relationships between STH exposure and MI, using geographic location in relation to the regional market center as a proxy for MI. This study documents lower rates of STHs in people living in more market integrated regions. The second study tests the coevolutionary role that STHs and other pathogens have played in shaping human psychology and behavior. Findings suggest that pathogen exposure has acted as a selective pressure, resulting in evolved disgust sensitivity toward pathogen related stimuli. This study provides evidence that disgust sensitivity is calibrated to local environments, acting to decrease STH exposure. The third study tests the role of STHs in immune function. CRP was positively related to age in uninfected individuals. No relationships existed for more traditionally living or infected individuals. These findings suggest that STH exposure may decrease the risk of developing chronic inflammation and associated diseases with advancing age. These studies provide support for the idea that STHs provide stimuli that decrease chronic inflammation, suggesting that altered intestinal microflora in developed nations may be partially responsible for the development of chronic inflammatory disorders like allergy and autoimmunity. This dissertation includes previously published and unpublished coauthored material.

Recent work has suggested that emotion regulation of inner emotional experience requires fewer cognitive resources for older adults than for young adults (Scheibe&Blanchard-Fields, 2009). The present study investigated whether cognitive costs are reduced for various types of emotion regulation strategies or only for certain types. The suppression of emotional expression, for example, is a particularly costly strategy for young adults, but little information exists regarding its cognitive costs for older adults. Furthermore, suppression of emotional expression is not a strategy that older adults are likely to use or that they become more effective at using. By contrast, the regulation of inner emotional experience has been shown to be more effective in older adults and presents less of a cognitive cost. The present study examined the cognitive costs of regulation of inner emotional experience (to conceptually replicate previous findings) and the cognitive costs of suppression of the outer expression of emotion. The results suggest that regulating and suppressing emotions do not require the same degree of resources for older and young adults. Whereas older adults may require more resources to suppress expression of emotions than to regulate emotions, young adults appear to require more resources to regulate emotions than to suppress the expression of emotions.

More than a half-century of behavioral political science has shaped the dominant view of American nonvoters in terms of their engagement and resource deficits. While nonvoters on average are indeed less educated, poorer, younger and less politically engaged, other scholarship suggests that many of them actively abstain due to disaffection with the political system. My dissertation aims to reconcile these disparate explanations for nonvoting, and to better understand those nonvoters whose resources and political attention should suffice to vote. Drawing upon recent work in psychology, I advance a theory that disgust with politics causes many to abstain, irrespective of resources. These disgusted individuals feel the political system has violated deeply held interpersonal and moral norms, and believe participation will be ineffective to mitigate its affronts. As a result, these individuals withdraw from politics both in terms of voting and gathering additional information. I label this behavior “principled abstention.” To test my hypotheses, I employ observational data, including original question batteries on the 2008 and 2010 Cooperative Congressional Election Studies, and a series of laboratory and nationally representative experiments. / text

In this thesis I argue that a leading sentimentalist theory, Rational Sentimentalism, faces the Problem of Superfluity because the evaluative properties to which certain emotions are responses can be defined independently of examining those emotional responses. In other words, the connection to value that Rational Sentimentalism aims for fails to obtain. I show that at least one such emotion, disgust, is influenced by higher cognition to a degree incompatible with Rational Sentimentalism avoiding the Problem of Superfluity. I conclude by suggesting ways in which other emotions are structurally similar to disgust, and therefore face the same problem in being incorporated into Rational Sentimentalism.

In the wake of the death of a prominent atheist figure in 2011, an especially unsavory side of anti-atheist prejudice became evident as many celebrated the death of a prominent atheist, rejoicing that he would be in hell. The current study explores how these attitudes reveal a sense of schadenfreude in anti-atheist prejudice previously unexplored in the literature. Potential origins of this schadenfreude are discussed, and a study to experimentally explore this phenomenon was carried out. Using the repeated taste-test paradigm, this study gave participants atheist primes and hell primes between identical drinks and measure perceived taste after these manipulations, intending for the hell primes to induce schadenfreude after atheist primes as a result from participants thinking about the atheists going to hell for their lack of faith. All predicted main effects and interactions were non-significant. Exploratory analyses were carried out to explain these null results. Implications and future directions are discussed.

Research shows that children often confuse facial expressions of fear with surprise and disgust with anger. According to the perceptual-attentional limitations hypothesis, facial expressions are confused because they share action units (Camras, 1980; Wiggers, 1982). Experiment 1 tested this hypothesis for the confusion between fear and surprise and Experiment 2 for the confusion between disgust and anger. Eye movements were monitored in both experiments. In experiment 1, the results showed that children were more accurate when two distinctive action units were presented than when the brow lowerer was the only distinctive action unit differentiating between fear and surprise. Furthermore, the results showed that participants spent more time fixating on the mouth than the eyebrows. They made more saccades when the only distinctive cue was in the eyebrows. In experiment 2, participants identified the emotion as anger when the mouth was open, and disgust when the mouth was closed, spending more time on the mouth when the mouth was open. These findings suggest that facial expressions are confused, not only because of the amount of visual similarities they share, but also because children do not allocate their attention to facial regions equally; they tend to focus on the mouth.