The Complete Disgustology: Including Contempt and other Gross Issues -

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Disgust is one of the seven universal emotions and arises as a feeling of aversion towards something offensive. We can feel disgusted by something we perceive with our physical senses (sight, smell, touch, sound, taste), by the actions or appearances of people, and even by ideas. Disgust contains a range of states with varying intensities from mild dislike to intense loathing. All states of disgust are triggered by the feeling that something is aversive, repulsive and/or toxic. Disgust may also alternate with the feeling of anger if the disgusted person is angry about being made to feel disgust. There is an ongoing debate within the scientific community as to whether certain forms of interpersonal and social disgust (being disgusted by another person’s appearance, actions, ideas or social standing) are learned and culture-specific or whether they exist in some form across all cultures. For example, everyone may have disgust reactions to a “morally tainted” person, but what is considered “morally tainted” might vary across cultures.1

The four types of disgust are: core, animal-nature, interpersonal, and moral. Researchers believe these four types developed in our ancestral past and helped our genes to survive by protecting our bodies from harm or by maintaining social order. Evidence for universality is facial expressions and behavior change does exist, although the action units associated with disgust vary according to the type of disgust. 2

Maybe a certain feeling of revulsion is universal, maybe it does protect us from disease and parasites even if it can be tuned by culture. But even such a feeling does exist in all cultures, does that make disgust a universal emotion?

There’s a moral element to disgust which goes beyond visceral revulsion. Darwin believed that ‘extreme contempt, or as it is sometimes called ‘loathing contempt’, hardly differed from disgust’ and the idea that moral disgust evolved alongside physical disgust persists in modern psychology. Valerie Curtis explains the link by suggesting that unusual behaviors trigger sensations of disgust because, to our ancestors, such behaviors meant that individual was probably infested with pathogens or parasites. But there may be another explanation that history can provide us with. It’s important to realize that the English word ‘disgust’ doesn’t have direct equivalents in most other languages. For example, as the linguist Anna Wierzbicka has pointed out, the German word often translated as disgust – Ekel – means a movement away from something unpleasant rather than a feeling of revulsion to food. The same is true of most other languages and, at one time, even English.

When John Florio – one of history’s most enthusiastic inventors of English words – chose to use the word ‘disgust’ in his translation of the Italian ‘Sgusto’, he wasn’t describing an emotion. The word ‘disgust’ spent the first century or so of its life referring mostly to things that tasted bad or that would cause displeasure, not to the feelings they produced.

That doesn’t necessarily mean that no one felt anything similar to physical and moral disgust. Passions that contained many disgust-like elements were described as the opposite of ‘desire’ and included ‘aversion’ (a need to move away from something), ‘abomination’ (the avoidance of sin and sinners), and the middle English sensation of ‘wlatsomnes’ (nausea).

These disgust-like passions started to become part of a new concept of ‘disgust’ in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when a group of English-speaking philosophers, including the third Earl of Shaftesbury, Francis Hutcheson and David Hume, began to use the word ‘disgust’ to describe the distasteful and unpleasant.

When these authors spoke about poor aesthetic taste, they were also talking about morality. The language used in their works on taste fairly closely match the language they used in their moral essays. Good taste and good morals, they believed, had a close relationship. These writers were extremely influential and their particular usage of ‘disgust’ was quickly absorbed into the English language. So quickly, in fact, that it took just 44 years from Shaftesbury’s use of ‘disgust’ in his 1711 work Characteristicks to the almost modern definition of disgust found in Samuel Johnson’s 1755 Dictionary.

By 1755, disgust as the opposite of pleasure, had begun to replace those earlier opposites of desire. A word used to describe the physical feelings associated with food had become part of the moral landscape. The sensation of disgust caused by the physical danger of pathogen contamination might well be evolved, but the moral element is yet another thing we can blame on the Enlightenment.3

How Does Self-Disgust Emerge?
If you evaluate some of your features or actions as disgusting, or if you come to associate your identity or your sense of yourself with an external stimulus that you find disgusting, you may develop feelings of self-disgust. These initial feelings of self-disgust may become strengthened if you spend a lot of time thinking about them or if other people reinforce your initial assessments. From here, the feelings of self-disgust may become fully incorporated into your self-identity and may guide your mental and psychological processing. Self-disgust may emerge in adulthood as a result of trauma or abuse experienced during childhood. Self-disgust may also result from changes in how the self is experienced in adulthood. For example, experiencing incontinence in adulthood may create feelings of self-disgust (Rachman, 2004). Self-disgust can be extremely distressing and may lead to self-isolation and social withdrawal as well as self harm behaviors. Self-disgust is associated with several mental health conditions including depression, eating disorders, and post-traumatic stress disorder.4

Comparing Disgust and Contempt

It’s important to note that contempt is related to but different from disgust. While both contempt and disgust can be directed toward people and their actions, disgust can also be aroused by objects that are aversive to the senses (taste, smell, sight, sound, touch). Additionally, contempt includes the feeling of superiority over the target of contempt, whereas one doesn’t necessarily feel superior to the person/thing that disgusts them. Another difference between disgust and contempt is our physical reaction. In disgust, the aversion causes us to move away from the source, whereas in contempt we don’t necessarily want to remove ourselves from the situation. Also, disgust doesn’t feel good- the sensations are unpleasant and, when extreme, lead to nausea. The sensations felt during contempt, on the other hand, are not necessarily unpleasant, and may even feel good. Since feeling contempt can assert a feeling of power, it may be a desirable emotion for some.As with all other emotions (universal or otherwise), the intensity of contempt varies, though the maximum intensity of contempt does not come near the maximum intensity of disgust.5

Do Politics Foster a “Culture of Contempt and Disgust”?

People often say that our problem in America today is incivility or intolerance. This is incorrect. Motive attribution asymmetry leads to something far worse: contempt, which is a noxious brew of anger and disgust. And not just contempt for other people’s ideas, but also for other people. In the words of the philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer, contempt is “the unsullied conviction of the worthlessness of another.” Contempt makes political compromise and progress impossible. It also makes us unhappy as people. According to the American Psychological Association, the feeling of rejection, so often experienced after being treated with contempt, increases anxiety, depression and sadness. It also damages the contemptuous person by stimulating two stress hormones, cortisol and adrenaline. In ways both public and personal, contempt causes us deep harm. What we need is not to disagree less, but to disagree better. And that starts when you turn away the rhetorical dope peddlers — the powerful people on your own side who are profiting from the culture of contempt. As satisfying as it can feel to hear that your foes are irredeemable, stupid and deviant, remember: When you find yourself hating something, someone is making money or winning elections or getting more famous and powerful. Unless a leader is actually teaching you something you didn’t know or expanding your worldview and moral outlook, you are being used.6

Note from Abel – a lot of people find my avatar repulsive and disgusting. Do You?