I am going to gag: Disgust cognitions in spider and blood–injury–injection fears

Abstract

There is mounting evidence that disgust plays an important role in certain anxiety disorders, yet little is known about disgust's cognitive component. The current study introduces a measure of cognitions associated with disgust and contamination to assess the role of disgust-specific primary and secondary appraisals in phobic responding. A multi-modal assessment of blood–injury–injection (BII) and spider phobia was conducted using BII (N=29) and spider (N=30) fearful groups, and a non-fearful control group (N=30). The Disgust Cognitions scale showed good reliability and validity, and distinguished among the groups. For example, relative to the other groups, the spider fear group reported higher disgust cognitions following presentation of a live spider, whereas the BII Fear group reported higher disgust cognitions following a surgery video. Moreover, the scale was associated with multiple phobic indicators (behavioural avoidance, subjective distress, symptom endorsement), suggesting cognitions may be critical to understanding how disgust contributes to anxiety disorders.

Acknowledgements

This research was supported by an NIMH R03 PA-03–039 grant to BT.The authors are thankful to Nichole Heiman and Suzanne Unger and the research assistance provided by members of the Teachman PACT lab at the University of Virginia.

Notes

Only those measures relevant to the current hypotheses are reported here.

²Post hoc Scheffe tests were mostly as expected based on fear group classification, so are not included here due to space constraints. The only exception concerned the last step completed for the surgery video, which showed few group differences because 89% of the full sample watched the entire video.