Yuck!: The Nature and Moral Significance of Disgust

Notes

Notes 1 Toward a Functional Theory of Disgust 1. See Keltner and Haidt 1999 for an exploration of some of the intermediate levels, focusing on the various social functions that emotions perform. 2. As has been noted by both Ekman (2003) and Griffiths (1997), affect programs resemble Fodorian modules enough to perhaps constitute being an instance (Fodor 1983). The extent of the overlap is unclear, however, in no small part because the notion of a module has become increasingly vexed in recent years (see Fodor 2000; Carruthers 2006, chap. 1). 3. For a more nuanced discussion of the feeling and first-person aspects of disgust, see W. Miller 1997 and Kolnai 1998. Given my aims and methods, I will not have much more to say about the phenomenology of the emotion (though see hereafter on oral incorporation), as the qualitative aspect of any mental state or process is notoriously difficult to pin down with empirical data or the resources of functionalism (Nagel 1974; Chalmers 2003; but see also Dennett 1991). 4. This appears to be a special case of the more general consistency of the disgust response across different domains of disgust elicitors. The details of contamination sensitivity, unsurprisingly, get complicated (see Elliott and Radomsky 2009; Radomsky and Elliott 2009). I discuss this issue at greater length in chapter 4. 5. This is not to say that individual elements of the response, or the entire response itself, cannot voluntary be suppressed in certain social contexts, exaggerated in others, or similarly shaped by certain culturally specific norms of expression (though it might be extremely difficult to completely block the expression of disgust; see chapter 3). 6. Disgustingness in the first two experiments was measured by self-report of the participants, but in the third, Web-based experiment, disgustingness of urban legends was measured using the Disgust Scale (Haidt et al. 1994). 7. Though the results are not as straightforward or easily interpretable, other studies have indicated how disgust can influence other forms of economic decision making. 154 Notes For instance, using an fMRI on participants playing the ultimatum game, Sanfey et al. (2003) found heightened activity in the anterior insula (the gustatory cortex associated with disgust) in reaction to unfair offers, and found that increased activity in the same area predicted whether a participant was likely to reject an offer. 8. See also Fessler and Haley 2006 for more on disgust and the bodily perimeter. 9. See also Cottrell and Neuberg 2005 for evidence that different out-groups produce prejudicial attitudes associated with different emotions. 10. In addition to absorbing his or her culture’s culinary sensibilities, another way for a food to become disgusting to an individual is for that person to experience intense gastrointestinal sickness after consuming it. I discuss this phenomenon further in chapter 2. 11. Fessler and Navarrete (2003a) document a further wrinkle in the link between disgust and sex. They show that women’s sensitivity to sexual elicitors of disgust, but only sexual elicitors, heightens during certain phases of their menstrual cycles, peaking when they are most able to conceive. Rather than indicating a categorically different kind of emotion or capacity, this phenomenon and others like it are best interpreted as revealing unconscious, automatic, but remarkably fine grained and individual specific calibration of the input or detection component of disgust (cf. Carruthers 2006, 200). Fessler and colleagues (2005) also found that pregnant women experience increased disgust sensitivity, especially toward food, in the first trimester of their pregnancies. Another example of this type of domain-specific fine tuning of disgust sensitivity is reported in a study done by Rozin (2008), which found that medical students’ sensitivity to a particular set of disgust elicitors— namely, those associated with death and body envelope violations—decreased over the first couple of months they spent dissecting human cadavers. The same participants , however, exhibited no decrease in sensitivity to elicitors from other disgust domains (sexual, moral, social, etc.). In a similar vein, mothers appear to be less disgusted by the smell of their own baby’s dirty diapers than by the smell of other babies’ (Case et al. 2006). 12. This style of explanation owes much to expositors of homuncular functionalism (Fodor 1968; Dennett 1978; Cummins 1983). There is no easy way to express it pictorially , but I should note here that I intend the model to remain neutral on the issue of whether or not the phenomenological or qualitative aspects of disgust are in fact caused, or if they are better...