Disgust ~ Survival’s Ick Factor

I share this article because for a long time, I've felt we live with a deeply repressed disgust for many of the values, concepts and ideals imposed upon us by the dominant culture. I find that disgust is healthy, as it's a subtle indication that we're dealing with something that doesn't sit right with us.

Often times we can't even identify where these feelings of disdain, discomfort and desire for distance originate, but conscious people more enlightened than I suggest that it is our own 'in-dweller' or our highest Self, our inate knowing of what's appropriate, letting us know that what we're thinking, or are doing is out of synch with Cosmic Wholeness. Yet we continue with the behaviour or attitude, and ignore the inner truth we hear or feel, because that's what we've been programmed to do.

I hope reading this and the article below will stimulate you to think deeply and free your repressed disgust. Express what you don't care for, want or believe in, so that your true Self's ideals, values and preferences may take their rightful place in your Dear Life, and 'way of Being in the world'. It takes some time and requires we keep our attention on what we think, say and our actions, before we do them. But we can release old thinking, and this allows our True Self to come back into activity, directing and guiding us from within.

I mean if you're a teen, and you know looking at someones' rusty butt crack , or dirty funky shorts hanging out of their jeans is disgusting... why would you want to Be that image? A little off the track, but it seems we have allowed ourselves to become a culture that embraces our weakest moments and hold them up as badges of pride. With Academy Award performances, we play the negative, demeaning, needy and small roles that those that don't care for us, know or understand us, hold and use to give the world their version of who we are.

So today, we are a major part of our own dis-service. We are choosing things, ideals, solutions and habits that we don't really like. And we're making this our Life, and who we are.

Rather, let's get back on the track of Who and What we really are, and develop an authentic identity. This means that we stop taking our cues from outside of ourselves. We quit allowing the media, psychological marketing and mass culture with it's mindless trends and fads, to use us for their profits, scapegoats and amusement. Instead let's develop a sense of self that is inwardly defined and determined by how much more we can be of the Realized potential, which lives within each of us from birth.

Read that sentence again. It's saying that you've achieved some of your potential, and you're continuing to move forward to transform into an even more expanded expression of those great possibilities that we always knew were contained within you. There's always more that we can Be...no matter how old we are, our circumstances or conditions. Something new, something profound, something great, which all Life, our people and the human community are needing, that can only come forth through each of our lives. So we must keep transforming, into our Best version of our True Self in these times.

Lastly Beloveds, don't think for a minute that I'm talking about a lot of hard difficult work. I've written about this in earlier blogs. My experience is that when you get in the flow of what's right for you ~ not for the economy, the nation, or the comfort of other people ~ things start to fall into place. You find the right help, at the right time, and because you're in touch with Being your highest Self, there's mystical protection where the Power of the invisable realm of Life joins in. Your new found joy and happiness are true, and your smile radiates from your Heart. Your attention on what the media is saying fades, because you have connected with a source of Goodness, that no matter what they say is going on, All is well in your world!

This is what I want for you Beloveds. Your confidence, peace, joy, prosperity and wholeness intact, and undisturable. Being aware of what disgusts you, is a step into that realm.

lovu,
Kentke

January 23, 2012
By JAMES GORMAN

Disgust is the Cinderella of emotions. While fear, sadness and anger, its nasty, flashy sisters, have drawn the rapt attention of psychologist, poor disgust has been hidden away in a corner, left to muck around in the ashes.

No longer. Disgust is having its moment in the light as researchers find that it does more than cause that sick feeling in the stomach. It protects human beings from disease and parasites, and affects almost every aspect of human relations, from romance to politics.

In several new books and a steady stream of research papers, scientists are exploring the evolution of disgust and its role in attitudes toward food, sexuality and other people.

Paul Rozin, a psychologist who is an emeritus professor at the University of Pennsylvania and a pioneer of modern disgust research, began researching it with a few collaborators in the 1980s, when disgust was far from the mainstream.

“It was always the other emotion,” he said. “Now it’s hot.”

It still won’t wear glass slippers, which may be just as well, given the stuff it has to walk through. Nonetheless, its reach takes disgust beyond the realms of rot and excrement.

Speaking last week from a conference on disgust in Germany, Valerie Curtis, a self-described “disgustologist” from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, described her favorite emotion as “incredibly important.”

She continued: “It’s in our everyday life. It determines our hygiene behaviors. It determines how close we get to people. It determines who we’re going to kiss, who we’re going to mate with, who we’re going to sit next to. It determines the people that we shun, and that is something that we do a lot of.”

It begins early, she said: “Kids in the playground accuse other kids of having cooties. And it works, and people feel shame when disgust is turned on them.”

Some studies have suggested that political conservatives are more prone to disgust than liberals are. And it is clear that what people find disgusting they often find immoral, too.

It adds to the popularity of disgust as a subject of basic research that it is easier to elicit in an ethical manner than anger or fear. You don’t have to insult someone or make anyone afraid for his or her life — a bad smell will do the trick. And disgust has been relatively easy to locate in the brain, where it frequents the insula, the amygdala and other regions.

“It is becoming a model emotion,” said Jonathan Haidt of the University of Virginia, a disgust pioneer with Dr. Rozin.

And the research may have practical benefits, including clues to obsessive compulsive disorder, some aspects of which — like excessive hand washing — look like disgust gone wild.

Conversely, some researchers are trying to inspire more disgust at dirt and germs to promote hand washing and improve public health. Dr. Curtis is involved in efforts in Africa, India and England to explore what she calls “the power of trying to gross people out.” One slogan that appeared to be effective in England in getting people to wash their hands before leaving a bathroom was “Don’t bring the toilet with you.”

Disgust was not completely ignored in the past. Charles Darwin tackled the subject in “The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals.” He described the face of disgust, documented by Guillaume-Benjamin Duchenne in his classic study of facial expressions in 1862, as if one were expelling some horrible-tasting substance from the mouth.

“I never saw disgust more plainly expressed,” Darwin wrote, “than on the face of one of my infants at five months, when, for the first time, some cold water, and again a month afterwards, when a piece of ripe cherry was put into his mouth.”

His book did not contain an image of the infant, but fortunately YouTube has numerous videos of babies tasting lemons.

Human beings are complex, of course, as evidenced by the behavior of parents who give their babies lemons and record their distress on video, and the lemon face is not exactly that of adult disgust.

It is, however, generally accepted that disgust evolved partly to avoid putting bad things in the mouth, an idea already put forth when Dr. Rozin tackled disgust. He and his colleagues developed the idea that disgust was then elaborated by cultural evolution to include other forms, one of them based in a dislike for reminders of the animal nature of humans. Sex, death, feces and bad food all smacked of animality.

There are many variations in how scientists now view disgust, but one new approach by evolutionary psychologists was captured in a December special issue of The Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, “Disease Avoidance: From Animals to Culture,” and in a conference on “The Evolution of Disgust” this month in Bielefeld, Germany, where many of the same scientists appeared.

Dr. Curtis contributed to the issue and the conference, and emphasized above all disgust as an adaptation to avoid disease-causing microbes and parasites that involves not only taste and smell but also sight and touch.

“To me the story is quite simple,” she said. The animal origins of disgust involve all sorts of ways that diseases are spread, includin fleas, so there are a variety of signs of disease and types of disgust.

“It’s not all oral,” Dr. Curtis said.

Under that evolutionary umbrella, however, there is still the question of what kinds of disgust there are. Dr. Haidt, Dr. Rozin and Clark McCauley of Bryn Mawr College claim nine different domains of disgust for North Americans. Dr. Curtis proposes seven categories. Joshua Tybur of VU University in Amsterdam proposed three domains of disgust, three separate psychological programs, for disease avoidance, mate choice and moral judgment.

“People who are sensitive to one type of disgust are not necessarily sensitive to another,” he said. For example, he said, earlier claims that political conservatives (self-identified) were more sensitive than liberals to disgust were overly general. Research that he and his colleagues did suggested that conservatives were more disgusted by sexual topics, but were similar to liberals in the domains of disease avoidance and moral judgment.

Still, it’s not always easy to say in which domain a form of disgust fits, and there is no reason that more than one can’t operate at the same time, given the right stimulus. Jeffrey Dahmer killed and ate people he had had sex with — a disgust trifecta if there ever was one.

Researchers have also been trying to pin down details about the mechanisms and evolutionary value of disgust. Daniel Fessler, an anthropologist at the Center for Behavior, Evolution and Culture at the University of California, Los Angeles, investigated with his colleagues why pregnant women were more sensitive to disgust. What they found was that as progesterone levels went up, so did sensitivity to disgust. That was true in the first trimester of pregnancy, when derailing fetal development would have the most dire effects. In very recent work, Dr. Fessler said, the researchers found that even in women who weren’t pregnant and were not suffering nausea, disgust increased with the levels of progesterone.

An important function of progesterone, Dr. Fessler said, is that it dials down an early-warning part of the immune system, inflammation, which might prevent the embryo, or conceptus, from implanting itself in the placenta. The eight-cell embryo “actually destroys tissue as it burrows in,” Dr. Fessler said. “Left to its own, the maternal immune system would destroy the conceptus.” So, he and his colleagues reason, while the body turns down the dial on one kind of protection, it turns it up on disgust, another kind of defense.

Whatever the fine points of disgust, its power to affect behavior is unquestioned, and that power ought to be put to good use, Dr. Curtis said. So, in one of her projects, she has worked with an Indian public relations agency to come up with a disgust-based campaign to encourage hand washing among mothers in small villages, which could save countless children’s lives lost to diarrhea and other diseases.

REVOLTING

In India, the power of disgust to improve villagers' hygiene is being tested. Center of Gravity, a Bangalore agency working with Valerie Curtis, a disgust researcher, created skits including this role, Laddu Lingam; he makes treats of mud and worms and never washes his hands. Another character, Supermom, shows the proper behavior.

The result, now being tested, is a skit involving two characters, one a supermom and the other a disgusting, dirty man. The man makes sweets using mud and worms, stops in the middle of the performance to rush off because he has diarrhea, never washes his hands and does everything possible to be revolting. Supermom is scrupulously clean. Her children don’t get sick, the skit makes clear. In fact, her baby grows up to be a doctor. She washes her hands all the time.

The prominence of diarrhea in the skit is no accident. One thing about studying disgust, Dr. Curtis said, is that it makes you realize how important it is to talk about the very things that disgust us, because they often present dangers to public health.

Exhibit 1 is excrement. “We need to talk about” excrement, she said, using a punchier single-syllable word for maximum effect — a word she is unapologetic about using, as befits a disgustologist.

“Which is worse?” Dr. Curtis asked. To talk about it, “or to make kids die?”



This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: January 23, 2012
An earlier version of this article misstated the name of the institution where Valerie Curtis works. It’s the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.