Visually Activating Pathogen Disgust: A New Instrument for Studying the Behavioral Immune System.

Area of Science:

• Psychology
• Behavioral Neuroscience
• Evolutionary Psychology

Background:

• Disgust is crucial for the behavioral immune system, acting as a defense against pathogens.
• Understanding disgust triggers and measurement is vital due to its role in psychiatric disorders.

Purpose of the Study:

• To identify effective disgust elicitors across cultures.
• To develop and validate a novel visual stimulus set for inducing and measuring disgust sensitivity.

Main Methods:

• A bottom-up approach identified widespread disgust triggers.
• Exploratory factor analysis revealed four components of pathogen-related disgust.
• A new image set (C-DIS) was created and validated against a previous set (Curtis et al., 2004).

Main Results:

• The C-DIS effectively elicited higher disgust responses than control images.
• The C-DIS showed concordance with the Curtis et al. set but offered improved sensitivity.
• Pathogen-salient images in C-DIS were more effective at triggering disgust.

Conclusions:

• The Culpepper Disgust Image Set (C-DIS) is a validated, effective tool for research.
• C-DIS can be used to prime disgust and measure individual differences in sensitivity.
• This advances the study of disgust's role in health, disease, and psychiatric conditions.