Disgust is associated with highly unpleasant sensations and emotions that want to be resolutely rejected. However, a closer, scientific look at even such negative emotional aspects holds interesting insights into our nature, as well as our culture. Thus, it is worthwhile to define the emotion of disgust, to explore its functions and benefits for humans, and to explain any disgust disorders in humans.
What is disgust?
Disgust can generally be described as all negative feelings, often associated with nausea and repulsion. Disgust can generally be described as all negative feelings often associated with nausea and repulsion. Important here is a felt physical reaction associated with the emotion of dislike. For example, not liking a politician because he or she represents an agenda that is wrong from one’s own point of view does not count as disgust, because there are usually no physical reactions because of it. Only when phenomena such as gagging, sweating, heart palpitations, dizziness or even vomiting occur does the reaction count as disgust. Due to the combination of mental rejection and physical repulsion, disgust is a very strong sensation that forcefully pushes itself into the foreground of the affected person’s consciousness. Most people are disgusted by a number of things themselves: feces, offal, mold, and garbage. Certain animals also cause disgust in many people, usually small animals such as worms, maggots, spiders and snakes. Speaking of animals, even animals with developed brains seem to be disgusted by certain things, or at least give them a wide berth. For example, great apes like chimpanzees are afraid to wade through rivers, which is why they can’t swim. Disgust is not exclusively human.
Function and task
The function of disgust for humans seems quite obvious: just like fear, disgust is a protective function, although unlike fear, it is not a matter of what things to run away from, but what things should simply be avoided, for example, what not to eat. If there were no disgust reaction, people would eat spoiled food, not take care of their garbage thoroughly, and live much less hygienically. Conditions where germs and diseases flourish would drastically reduce our life expectancy and quality. How strong and at the same time protective disgust can be could be proven in an experiment with apes: The apes’ own excrement was prepared by every trick in the book so that the primates would think it was food and eat it. It was painted, sprayed with scents and served together with conventional food. For free. The monkeys always refused to eat the feces. While the protective function of disgust is undisputed, its origin can be debated: Is disgust more genetic or cultural? Of course, animals also feel disgust, but animals certainly also have a kind of cultural evolution, in which behavioral norms are not passed on through genetic makeup, but through watching and learning. In the same way, there are also noticeable differences between human cultures. One example is the disgust many Europeans feel for insects such as grasshoppers, which are eaten as a delicacy or snack in Asia. What people consider disgusting and what not often depends on the values attached to things. For example, although there is no rational argument why dog meat should be less tasty than pork or beef, in this country we almost automatically feel disgust and rejection for meat from dogs. Simply because dog meat is not allowed to be for consumption in the West because it is considered immoral.
Diseases and ailments
Disgust disorders can go to either extreme. First, there are phobias, that is, exaggerated feelings of disgust and rejection toward things that are perfectly ordinary for the vast majority of people. Some phobias are quite understandable, such as arachnophobia (fear of spiders) or achluophobia (fear of darkness). But many others seem puzzling to most, including aquaphobia (fear of water or being in water) or coniophobia (fear of dust) and countless more. Sometimes phobias seem simply inexplicable, but invariably a traumatic childhood experience has been identified as the cause of the irrational disgust.For example, someone who almost drowned in a lake as a child may rightly fear even getting into a bathtub in the future. At the other extreme are those people who feel no disgust even at the most unhygienic things. Often this is even accompanied by sexual inclinations, which can be considered pathological fetishism (paraphilia). Examples may include corpses (necrophilia), feces (coprophilia), the urge to eat excrement (coprophagia), and urine (urophilia). It is still the subject of intensive psychological research what causes these paraphilias and why disgust is not only eliminated in them, but formally reversed into rapture. Frequently, severe personality disorders are suspected in the affected persons. It is also striking that these persons never suffer primarily from their perversions, but are confronted with their disorder only through the social environment, whether by confrontation with the law or rebuke from other people.
