Disgust.

Disgust.

1. Dr Valerie Curtis from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, surveyed people from different countries to find out what they found disgusting.

   • Cultural peculiarities included:
     • Food cooked my menstruating women was a frequent cause of disgust in India.
     • Fat people scored highly as disgusting in the Netherlands.
   • Overall people kept reporting the same things as disgusting, wherever they were from:
     • Bodily secretions - faeces, vomit, sweat, spit, blood pus, sexual fluids.
     • Body parts - wounds, corpses, toenail clippings.
     • Decaying food - especially rotting meat and fish, rubbish.
     • Certain living creatures - flies, maggots, lice, worms, rats, dogs and cats.
     • People who are ill, contaminated.

2. This led Curtis to hypothesis that disgust might be genetic; hard-wired in our brains and imprinted on our biological code by millions of years of natural selection.

3. The origin of faeces.

   • Excreta is the most common cause of disgust around the world.
   • This convinced Curtis that disgust was a biological mechanism for avoiding infectious disease.
   • The genes for disgust probably arose by accident and then became common through natural selection.
   • The observation that most animals avoid eating each other's faeces suggests that disgust could have evolved a very long time ago.

4. Unwashed genes.

   • Curtis still believes that upbringing plays an important role in determining what we find disgusting. But she believes that we have evolved genes that predispose us to find some things more disgusting that others.

5. Opposing views.

   • Paul Rozin of Penn State University believes that disgust is culturally acquired.
   • He carried out his own study on things people found disgusting and discovered the causes of death rated highest amoungst his North American subjects.
   • "Anything that reminds us we are animals elicits disgust." "Disgust functions like a defence mechanism, to keep human animalness out of awareness."

6. Anatomy of disgust.

   • Professor Paul Ekman of the University of California found that our facial expression for disgust was identical in different cultures around the globe.
   • We make this expression by screwing up our noses and pulling down the corners of our mouths.
   • MRI scans also reveal that we use a special part of the brain when we get disgusted: the anterior insular cortex.
   • Curtis has even claimed that disgust could have been one of the first words uttered by humans.
     • The word "Yuck" is similar in languages all over the world.