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Mechanisms of Disgust in Psychopathology

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Abstract

Over the previous two to three decades there has been accumulating evidence that the disease-avoidance emotion of disgust is closely associated with and regularly experienced in a number of different psychopathologies and mental health problems. Some of the symptoms of these mental health problems have obvious links to disgust and the kinds of events and stimuli that elicit the emotion (e.g., contamination fears in obsessive compulsive disorder [OCD]). Some other conditions appear to have an indirect link with disgust through perceived harbingers of disease, such as small animal phobias. While still other psychopathologies have characteristics similar to the avoidance responses typical of disgust, such as fear of oral incorporation.

The growing list of disgust-related psychopathologies raises a number of theoretical questions about how the disgust emotion has become associated with these conditions, and what role, if any, disgust plays in the development and maintenance of these psychopathologies. Such questions are not just of theoretical interest, they may also provide vital information about the kinds of effective interventions we might develop to alleviate these psychopathologies.

In this chapter, I will describe a number of putative mechanisms through which the emotion of disgust might influence the symptoms of mental health problems and examine how these putative mechanisms might fit the existing evidence on disgust-relevant psychopathologies.

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  1. School of Psychology, University of Sussex, Brighton, UK

    Graham C. L. Davey

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  1. School of Health and Related Research, University of Sheffield, Sheffield, UK

    Philip A. Powell

  2. Department of Psychological Medicine, University of Auckland, Auckland, New Zealand

    Nathan S. Consedine

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Davey, G.C.L. (2021). Mechanisms of Disgust in Psychopathology. In: Powell, P.A., Consedine, N.S. (eds) The Handbook of Disgust Research. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-84486-8_11

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