Male and female phobic subjects did not differ in their verbal reports of fear and disgust experienced.
"If you're walking down a row in a supermarket and every package is screaming at you, it sounds like a terrifying, disgusting experience," said Tracy Lovatt, director for behavioral planning at BBDO North America, an advertising agency in the Omnicom Group.
Given the well documented role of the IFO in coding experience and social observation of disgust (among other feeling states), an interesting question would be whether this area would similarly respond to individuals vivid imagination of disgusting experiences.
Specifically, individuals who are prone to experiencing relatively elevated levels of disgust may experience a greater number of intrusive thoughts about this type of event after it occurs.
And because it remains tightly linked to the disgust we experience in the presence of oral contaminants (like putrid meat), it makes sense that inducing disgust with a rotten smell could cause a shift in attitudes toward certain individuals or social groups.
Just as when you stub your toe and there is an anticipatory moment before you actually feel the pain, I waited to feel the rage and disgust that experience told me would be my natural response to another person barfing all over me.
So-called "hot" emotions, such as surprise and disgust, are experienced instantaneously and powerfully.
Thus, given that traumatic events frequently involve exposure to disgust-eliciting environmental cues, it follows that an individual's propensity to experience disgust reactions may influence their responses to trauma.
This study investigated the effect of an experimental disgust induction and experience of a homophone spelling task on subsequent anxiety to fear-relevant, disgust-relevant and fear-irrelevant stimuli in a non-clinical population.
