Content area
Abstract
The emotion, disgust, consists of four domains: core, animal reminder, contamination, and moral. Moral disgust is a relatively new concept and characterized by moral violations of community, autonomy, and divinity. The CAD triad hypothesis proposes that the moral emotions of contempt, anger, and disgust correspond with the aforementioned violations, respectively. Disgust, like all emotions, is comprised of three components: cognitive, physiological, and behavioral. The current study examined individuals’ cognitive (self-report), physiological (skin conductance; heart rate), and behavioral (avoidance; facial muscle activation) responses when exposed to disgust eliciting videos, specifically to explicate the moral domain. Participants were 108 undergraduate students (62% female) who participated in exchange for research or course credit. The sample consisted of 70.4% Caucasian, 13.9% African-American, 13% Asian, 2.8% Hispanic, and 2% multiracial individuals. Ages ranged from 18-26 years (M = 19.04; SD = 1.33). Individuals presented to the lab, completed self-report measures, and engaged in a behavioral task that entailed watching six 2:00 minute disgust eliciting video clips. Each video clip was associated with a specific domain of disgust, including core, animal reminder, contamination, moral - community, moral - autonomy, and moral - divinity.
Results indicate a significant self-reported disgust response among core, animal reminder, and contamination domains, whereas the moral domains elicited both anger and disgust. Physiologically, no change was measured in skin conductance; heart rate decrease in response to animal reminder, contamination, community, and autonomy video clips. Significant behavioral avoidance was demonstrated when presented with the core and animal reminder video clips. Further, when measuring facial muscle activation, the levator labii was significantly activated in response to the core video clip, but no others. The current study highlights the difficulty in establishing characteristic responses to disgust stimuli, especially within the moral domain. However, it is evident that the moral domain video clips do elicit a mixed emotional response, primarily anger and disgust. This finding further establishes the complexity of the domain and supports future research focusing on the incorporation of additional physiological measures, as well as parsing out additional emotional responses.
