In the present study, we only investigated evoked responses to passively viewed disgusting and neutral images; the influence of emotion regulation will be presented elsewhere.
In this task, subjects viewed disgusting or neutral images, taken from the International Affective Picture System (Lang et al. 2008); disgusting pictures included moldy food, humans with unsightly skin conditions, rotten teeth, and so on.
Small volume-corrected analyses carried out for regions in the insulae and putamena (based on the results of previous studies in controls) revealed lower levels of blood oxygen level-dependent (BOLD) signal in the left dorsal mid-anterior insula in subjects with pre-manifest Huntington's disease compared with control subjects when they viewed disgusted faces.
Startle magnitudes were larger when viewing disgusting and fearful slides compared with neutral slides (both p <.005) and when viewing disgusting compared with sad slides (p <.005).
There are many variations in how scientists now view disgust, but one new approach by evolutionary psychologists was captured in a December special issue of The Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, "Disease Avoidance: From Animals to Culture," and in a conference on "The Evolution of Disgust" this month in Bielefeld, Germany, where many of the same scientists appeared.
By making participants view disgusted facial expression of others, read disgust provoking scenarios and taste an unpleasantly bitter solution, we found a modality a-specific involvement of a region of the IFO during disgust.
Moreover, the girls showed a therapy-specific reduction in overall disgust proneness, as well as in experienced arousal and disgust when viewing disgust pictures.
The receptive (or passive) partner, on the other hand, is viewed with disgust.
Other ways of doing things, such as the arrangement of marriages by family elders, are viewed with disgust and condescension.
Physiological processes (e.g., urination and other forms of elimination) are often viewed with disgust, and as a result many modern notions of sanitation are based on not entirely rational principles.
In a double-blind placebo-controlled cross-over design, we measured brain activity, using functional magnetic resonance imaging, whilst nine medication-free HD carriers, and ten control participants viewed emotional (disgust, fear, angry, sad, surprise, happy) and neutral faces, following acute intranasal oxytocin (24 IU) and placebo.
