Disgust: (Part 2)

From Cognitive Rules to Contemporary Insights

If Darwin gave disgust its starting point and Douglas and Angyal gave it cultural and symbolic depth, Paul Rozin and his collaborators transformed it into a full research programme. From the 1970s onwards, disgust was mapped across domains, linked to cognition and development, and eventually extended into neuroscience, moral psychology, and disease-avoidance theory.

Rozin and the Expansion of Disgust

Rozin et al. (2000/2008) identified “core disgust” in oral incorporation and food rejection: taste is the primary sense, the mouth the epicentre, and spitting/vomiting the characteristic actions. But crucially, disgust operates by cognitive rules:

• Contagion: once in contact, always contaminated.

• Similarity: if it looks like it, it carries its essence.

  
  

Classic experiments show participants refusing to drink juice stirred with a new comb, or eat chocolate shaped like dog faeces—rationally harmless but subjectively contaminating.

From this core, Rozin expanded disgust’s reach to bodily products, animals and their wastes, and then to domains of sex, hygiene, death, gore, and socio-moral violations. His ;animal-reminder; thesis suggested that disgust often helps us disown our animality.

This theme was elaborated on by William Ian Miller (1997), who captured its asymmetry with the aphorism: “a teaspoon of sewage spoils a barrel of wine.”

Senses, Boundaries, and Territories of the Self

While taste and ingestion are central, other senses matter: smell and touch are often primary in lived experience, and proximity intensifies disgust. Hair again illustrates the point: acceptable on the head, revolting in food.

Sociologist Erving Goffman (1971) broadened the f

rame with his notion of ‘territories of the self’: personal space, possessions, and conversational preserves. Their violation often evokes disgust as much as indignation, linking bodily boundaries to social ones.

Developmental Pathways

Disgust emerges later in childhood than simple distaste. Infants display aversion to bitterness, but genuine disgust - requiring contagion and similarity reasoning - develops between ages 4 and 8 (Rozin, 2015). Young children’s tolerance of faeces or vomit contrasts starkly with adult revulsion, underscoring the role of cognitive development.

Across the lifespan, disgust may soften in some domains but harden in others, reflecting shifting priorities in self-regulation. Incest avoidance exemplifies a near-universal domain where disgust acts as a brake, plausibly shaped by Westermarck-style kinship cues (Lieberman, Tooby, & Cosmides, 2003) – the affect being we are not later attracted to someone we have grown up with.

Disgust, Fear, Contempt, and Shame

Disgust is aversive like fear, but the actions diverge: fear accelerates the heart and mobilises flight; disgust slows the heart and motivates expelling or cleansing (Schienle et al., 2001). Disgust lingers—the labour of purification takes time.

Though contempt and disgust both convey superiority, contempt can be light or amused, whereas disgust is embodied, unpleasant, and sensory (Miller, 1997). Shame, meanwhile, often merges with self-disgust: one “soils” oneself morally, and clinical research now links self-disgust to depression, eating disorders, and self-harm.

Neural Substrates and the Insula

Neuropsychology and neuroimaging converge on the anterior insula as a hub for disgust. Damage here impairs disgust recognition (Calder et al., 2000), while observing others’ disgust activates the same region (Wicker et al., 2003). The insula thus embodies disgust as both felt and empathically recognised. Basal ganglia and orbitofrontal cortex also contribute, but the insula seems to remain central.

From Purity to Morality

Disgust extends into morality. Facial electromyography shows levator labii activation (nose-wrinkling) when people encounter moral violations (Chapman et al., 2009). Yet the evidence is mixed: incidental disgust sometimes heightens moral severity (Schnall et al., 2008), but effects vary by context and replication studies caution against over-generalisation. Still, disgust’s sensory roots bleed into social judgement.

Disgust as a Disease-Avoidance System

Modern evolutionary models treat disgust as part of the behavioural immune system: perceptual, affective, and behavioural defences against pathogens (Rozin, 2015; Tybur, Lieberman, & Griskevicius, 2009). The BIS explains why we recoil from bodily fluids, spoiled food, or poor hygiene, even absent objective risk.

The COVID-19 pandemic tested this framework. Some studies found elevated pathogen disgust early in lockdown (Stevenson et al., 2021; Miłkowska et al., 2021), while others reported stability or shifts limited to moral disgust (Carr et al., 2022; Schwambergová et al., 2023). Disgust sensitivity, it seems, can be situationally calibrated but remains trait-stable over time.

Culture, Identity, and Love’s (and sexual attraction’s) Suspension of Disgust

Cultures vary in elicitors of disgust (excreta and rotting corpses are near-universal, but specific food taboos differ). Douglas’s ‘matter out of place’ and Rozin’s contamination laws explain both convergence and divergence.

Disgust also shapes dietary identity: vegetarians and vegans often experience meat not simply as immoral but as disgusting, with ‘meat-disgust’ scales predicting avoidance (Rosenfeld & Tomiyama, 2019).

And yet disgust can be suspended. Intimacy and kinship relax avoidance rules: parents clean infants without revulsion; lovers share utensils (and engage in what may otherwise be deemed disgusting acts - the disgust seemingly suspended as reproduction takes precedence, evolutionarily speaking).

Recent work on the behavioural immune system  confirms that valuing others can attenuate avoidance responses to pathogen cues—trading infection risk for social connection.

Conclusion

From Darwin’s soup-on-the-beard to Rozin’s laws of contagion and contemporary models of the behavioural immune system, disgust has proven to be both ancient and adaptable. It protects the body from pathogens, maintains cultural and personal boundaries, and even shapes moral judgement. Neuroscience has located its visceral centre in the insula; anthropology has shown its cultural variation; psychology has charted its developmental and cognitive rules.

Yet disgust is not fixed. Intimacy can suspend it, cultures redefine it, and crises like pandemics recalibrate it. What revolts us is never only in the object, but in the meanings, boundaries, and identities we attach to it. As such, disgust remains one of the most revealing emotions for understanding how human beings negotiate the fragile line between the animal, the social, and the moral.

References (Part 2)

• Calder, A. J., et al. (2000). Impaired recognition and experience of disgust following insular cortex damage. Brain, 123(5), 1105–1117.

• Carr, P., et al. (2022). The effect of the COVID-19 pandemic on disgust sensitivity in a sample of UK adults. Frontiers in Public Health.

• Chapman, H. A., et al. (2009). In bad taste: Evidence for the oral origins of moral disgust. Emotion, 9(2), 127–135.

• Goffman, E. (1971). Relations in Public: Microstudies of the Public Order. London: Allen Lane.

• Lieberman, D., Tooby, J., & Cosmides, L. (2003). Does morality have a biological basis? Psychological Bulletin, 129(6), 835–868.

• Miller, W. I. (1997). The Anatomy of Disgust. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

• Miłkowska, K., et al. (2021). Disgust sensitivity among women during the COVID-19 pandemic. Frontiers in Psychology, 12, 622634.

• Rosenfeld, D. L., & Tomiyama, A. J. (2019). When meat gets personal: A review of processes underlying meat avoidance. Appetite, 143, 104402.

• Rozin, P. (2015). Disgust. In International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences (2nd ed., pp. 661–665). Elsevier.

• Rozin, P., Haidt, J., & McCauley, C. R. (2000/2008). Disgust. In Handbook of Emotions (2nd/3rd eds.). New York: Guilford.

• Schienle, A., et al. (2001). Disgust, emotion, and psychophysiology. Psychophysiology, 38(2), 175–181.

• Schnall, S., et al. (2008). Disgust as embodied moral judgment. Psychological Science, 19(9), 934–938.

• Schwambergová, D., et al. (2023). Pandemic elevates moral disgust but not pathogen/sexual disgust. Scientific Reports, 13, 8398.

• Stevenson, R. J., et al. (2021). The impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on disgust sensitivity. Frontiers in Psychology, 12, 600761.

• Tybur, J. M., Lieberman, D., & Griskevicius, V. (2009). Microbes, mating, and morality: Individual differences in three functional domains of disgust. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 97(1), 103–122.

• Wicker, B., et al. (2003). Both of us disgusted in my insula: The common neural basis of seeing and feeling disgust. Neuron, 40(3), 655–664.