Why people disgust me

But disgust is also associated with immorality and the researchers from the University's School of Psychology set out to establish why this should be, given its disparate origins in disease avoidance. One prominent answer has been that people are disgusted by immoral acts that lead to feelings of contamination or impurity, but this view is difficult to reconcile with the observation that people also say that they are disgusted by acts like stealing, bullying or cheating.

The Kent researchers, Tom Kupfer and Professor Roger Giner-Sorolla, established that disgust's role in morality is not explained wholly by what people feel when they express disgust in response to an immoral behaviour, but also what they seek to communicate. In two experiments study participants were asked to consider different scenarios in which a person expressed either anger or disgust.

They were then questioned about what they thought was motivating the person expressing each emotion. The results showed that a person who expresses disgust is judged to be motivated more by impartial, moral, concerns while a person who expresses anger towards the same immoral act is more likely to be motivated by self-interest.

An expression of disgust therefore signals different information to an observer than an expression of anger. Perhaps, then, people express disgust rather than anger when they want to show that they are motivated by moral concerns.

Two further experiments confirmed this: participants themselves were more likely to choose to express disgust when their goal was to show that their condemnation of an act was morally motivated, while they chose to express anger when they sought to protest that the act harmed their own interests. The findings suggest that disgust is not just an expression of an inner feeling, like nausea or contamination, but a signal that advertises a moral position.

Unfortunately, most societies teach the avoidance of certain groups of people deemed physically or morally disgusting and, thus, can be a driving force in dehumanizing and degrading others. Intimacy lowers the threshold for what we consider disgusting. So, while we still may feel some degree of disgust, it is reduced enough that we are able to help those we care about. Now, rather than try to get away, we are called to reduce the suffering of the loved one e. This suspension of disgust establishes intimacy and may even strengthen love and community.

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Expand your knowledge of emotional skills and competencies with in-person workshops offered through Paul Ekman International. Delve into personal exploration and transformation with Cultivating Emotional Balance. Build your emotional vocabulary with the Atlas of Emotions , a free, interactive learning tool created by Drs. Paul and Eve Ekman at the request of the Dalai Lama. Read Dr. Introduce the world of emotions to children in a fun way with Dr.

What is disgust? Feeling disgust. Source: Atlas of Emotions. What disgusts us. This is an involuntary response caused by our unconscious desire to quickly get rid of what our body perceives as a toxic threat, whether to our physical well-being or to our mental health. Maybe you're like me, and sometimes you suddenly realize you're having a judgmental thought about someone. When I experience this, I make sure to pause and make a mental list for myself of the reasons such negative thoughts are harmful.

When thinking in a judgmental, narcissistic frame of mind I feel bad. We first learn to express the things that bother us as children, we tell our parents about the things we dislike. Disgust is one of our most basic emotions and is naturally expressed early in infants through rejection and avoidance behaviors. Think of a baby's facial expression tasting food he or she doesn't like for the first time.

Hopefully, mom and dad put up with just the right amount of our tantrums, while also guiding us to better ways of communicating that we think something is "yucky" without throwing a narcissistic fit. If our parents responded in ways that confused us, we can't figure out what else to do with our feelings of disgust. This leads us to bottle those emotions up — until we explode!

All of this happens because the feelings of disgust, disdain, and contempt tie in with our senses of taste, smell, and touch. Both emotions arise as our body responds to a perceived threat to our survival. While it may feel bad, disgust is actually a tremendously important emotion. It is part of what fuels our ability to ask for what we want and need, and it helps us find the gumption to act assertively. However, when we feel disgusted, we automatically suppress our attention to our visual world.

Our eyes and nostrils open wide to scan for threats, without paying attention to the other sights and smells around us We can determine the difference between fear and disgust threats within 96 milliseconds. This is way faster than we can think. As adults, we must train ourselves to act responsibly for our response to feelings of disgust by slowing this process down so we can think logically and rationally about the issues at hand.