Does food play a prominent role in visual attention to disgusting stimuli?
Category
Journal Article
Authors
Fančovičová, J, Prokop, P, Šramelová, D, Thiebaut, G, Méot, A, Witt, A, Bonin, P, Medina‑Jerez, W
Year
2021
Title
Does food play a prominent role in visual attention to disgusting stimuli?
Journal / book / conference
Journal of Ethology
Abstract
Disgust is a basic emotion which protects individuals from potential contamination. It is hypothesized that disgust evolved
primarily as a mechanism against oral contamination or as a strategy against disease infections in general. We investigated
visual attention to disgusting oral (rotten food) and non-oral (e.g., a tick) and control (e.g., a gull), non-disgusting stimuli
using a touch-screen paradigm with a sample of 60 adult participants in Slovakia. We found that disgusting pictures triggered
visual attention more than control pictures and that visual attention was not related to an individual’s sensitivity to
pathogen disgust. Although participants identified disgusting food items quicker than non-disgusting food pictures, these
differences did not reach statistical significance. Findings in this study suggest that the evolution of disgust could have been
originally favoured by the repulsion of contaminated food, but the benefits from disease avoidance were soon extended to
disgust sensitivity to pathogens that threaten our bodies using non-oral entry points.
Keywords
Emotion · Evolution · Pathogens · Oral contamination · Food disgust · Visual attention