Culpepper Paxton D, Havlíček Jan, Leongómez Juan David, Roberts S Craig
Division of Psychology, University of Stirling, Stirling, United Kingdom.
Department of Zoology, Charles University, Prague, Czechia.
Front Psychol. 2018 Aug 8;9:1397. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2018.01397. eCollection 2018.
The emotion of disgust plays a key role in the behavioral immune system, a set of disease-avoidance processes constituting a frontline defense against pathogenic threats. In the context of growing research interest in disgust, as well as recognition of its role in several psychiatric disorders, there is need for an improved understanding of behavioral triggers of disgust and for adequate techniques to both induce disgust in experimental settings and to measure individual variability in disgust sensitivity. In this study, we sought to address these issues using a multi-stage, bottom-up approach that aimed first to determine the most widespread and effective elicitors of disgust across several cultures. Based on exploratory factor analysis of these triggers, revealing four main components of pathogen-related disgust, we then generated a novel visual stimulus set of 20 images depicting scenes of highly salient pathogen risk, along with paired control images that are visually comparable but lack the disgust trigger. We present a series of validation analyses comparing our new stimulus set (the Culpepper Disgust Image Set, C-DIS) with the most commonly used pre-existing set, a series of 7 images devised by Curtis et al. (2004). Disgust scores from participants who rated the two image sets were positively correlated, indicating cross-test concordance, but results also showed that our pathogen-salient images elicited higher levels of disgust and our control images elicited lower levels of disgust. These findings suggest that the novel image set is a useful and effective tool for use in future research, both in terms of priming disgust and for measuring individual differences in disgust sensitivity.
厌恶情绪在行为免疫系统中起着关键作用，行为免疫系统是一组疾病规避过程，构成了抵御病原体威胁的第一道防线。鉴于对厌恶情绪的研究兴趣日益浓厚，以及认识到其在几种精神疾病中的作用，有必要更好地理解厌恶情绪的行为触发因素，并需要有适当的技术来在实验环境中诱发厌恶情绪，并测量厌恶敏感性的个体差异。在本研究中，我们试图采用一种多阶段、自下而上的方法来解决这些问题，该方法首先旨在确定几种文化中最普遍、最有效的厌恶诱发因素。基于对这些触发因素的探索性因素分析，揭示了与病原体相关的厌恶情绪的四个主要成分，我们随后生成了一组由20张图像组成的新颖视觉刺激集，描绘了高度突出的病原体风险场景，以及与之配对的对照图像，这些对照图像在视觉上具有可比性，但没有厌恶触发因素。我们进行了一系列验证分析，将我们的新刺激集（卡尔佩珀厌恶图像集，C-DIS）与最常用的现有图像集进行比较，现有图像集是柯蒂斯等人（2004年）设计的一组7张图像。对这两组图像进行评分的参与者的厌恶得分呈正相关，表明跨测试一致性，但结果也表明，我们的病原体突出图像引发了更高水平的厌恶情绪，而我们的对照图像引发了更低水平的厌恶情绪。这些发现表明，无论是在引发厌恶情绪还是在测量厌恶敏感性的个体差异方面，新的图像集都是未来研究中一种有用且有效的工具。
