Vicario Carmelo M, Sommer Werner, Kuran Karolina A, Rafal Robert D
Wolfson Centre for Clinical and Cognitive Neuroscience, School of Psychology, Bangor University, Bangor, United Kingdom; School of Psychology, University of Tasmania, Tasmania, Australia.
Department of Psychology, Humboldt-University at Berlin, Germany.
Acta Psychol (Amst). 2017 Jul;178:18-24. doi: 10.1016/j.actpsy.2017.05.007. Epub 2017 May 27.
Although a direct link has been established between self-experienced disgust and salivary secretion, it is unclear whether this physiological index is modulated by the social experience of disgust (i.e., exposure to the facial expression of disgust). We tested this issue in a pilot study by collecting salivary samples in a group of 20 healthy humans watching pictures of faces expressing disgust. Moreover, we tried to replicate previous evidence by testing saliva secretion in response to pictures of unpalatable (i.e., rotten) food and non-gustatory disgusting stimuli (i.e., disgusting insects). Overall, our analysis shows a general reduction of saliva secretion in response to disgust stimuli, compared to their positive counterparts, although further analyses for specific stimulus categories indicated that this difference was statistically significant only for food pictures. The non-significance of the face and insect categories might be due to insufficient power of our small sample. Overall, a general reduction of saliva secretion for different disgust-related stimuli suggests a shared mechanism of encoding, in line with theories of neural reuse.
尽管自身感受到的厌恶与唾液分泌之间已建立起直接联系，但尚不清楚这种生理指标是否会受到厌恶的社会体验（即接触厌恶的面部表情）的调节。我们在一项初步研究中对这一问题进行了测试，让20名健康人观看表达厌恶的面部图片，并收集他们的唾液样本。此外，我们试图通过测试对难吃（即腐烂）食物图片和非味觉性厌恶刺激（即令人厌恶的昆虫）的唾液分泌来重现先前的证据。总体而言，我们的分析表明，与积极对应物相比，对厌恶刺激的唾液分泌普遍减少，尽管对特定刺激类别的进一步分析表明，这种差异仅在食物图片方面具有统计学意义。面部和昆虫类别无统计学意义可能是由于我们小样本的检验效能不足。总体而言，不同厌恶相关刺激下唾液分泌的普遍减少表明存在一种共享的编码机制，这与神经再利用理论相符。
