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Undisguised disgust: a psychometric evaluation of a disgust propensity measure

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Abstract

Disgust, considered as one of the basic emotions universally shared across various cultures, has only recently attracted increased research interest. Originally developed as a key component of the behavioural immune system serving to protect the body from infectious pathogens, disgust has taken on other roles such as guiding our moral judgements, political preferences, or even choices of sexual partners. Despite these adaptive roles, disgust may, on the other hand, be responsible for negative social (xenophobia, homophobia) or clinical phenomena (common anxiety disorders such as specific phobias of obsessive-compulsive disorder), thus, a reliable measure of individual tendencies to experience disgust is indispensable. The aim of this study was to develop and analyse a Czech version of the Disgust Scale – Revised, one of the most widely used assessment of disgust propensity. Using a back-translation procedure and a counterbalanced test-retest experimental design, we demonstrated that scores on the Czech measure correlated with those on the English original (test-retest reliability r = 0.82) and both measures were found equivalent (p = 0.019). We also adopted a general linear model to show that the level of disgust is affected by sex, age, and education/occupancy, as women and people with no biology education score significantly higher than men and biologists, respectively. Finally, our data provide support to a bifactor model composed of general disgust taping into all items in addition to three distinct disgust domains.

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Acknowledgements

We are grateful to Kristýna Sedláčková and Adéla Becková for their great help with data collection. We would also like to thank Eli Rice for proof reading the manuscript, Prof Jonathan Haidt for his endless support, and two anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments that helped improve the text substantially. Finally, our big thank you goes to all our respondents who agreed and devoted their time to take part in the study.

Funding

This study is a result of the research funded by the project Nr. LO1611 with a financial support from the MEYS under the NPU I program; the Program for Science Development at Charles University in Prague [no. P03: Development of Psychological Science, subprogram Theoretical Psychology and Methodology]; and the Czech Science Foundation [project GA ČR n. 17-15991S].

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. National Institute of Mental Health, Topolová 748, 250 67, Klecany, Czech Republic

    Jakub Polák, Eva Landová & Daniel Frynta

  2. Department of Psychology, Faculty of Arts, Charles University, Celetná 20, 116 42, Prague 1, Czech Republic

    Jakub Polák

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  1. Jakub Polák
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  2. Eva Landová
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Correspondence to Jakub Polák.

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Polák, J., Landová, E. & Frynta, D. Undisguised disgust: a psychometric evaluation of a disgust propensity measure. Curr Psychol 38, 608–617 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-018-9925-4

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