Will you touch a dirty diaper? Attitudes towards disgust and behaviour

Abstract

Individuals differ in their willingness to engage with disgusting stimuli (e.g., dirty diapers). We propose that such differences are associated with attitudes towards disgust. Specifically, we predicted that people with less negative attitudes towards disgust (i.e., those who evaluate disgust less negatively) would be more willing to engage with disgusting stimuli. We asked participants to engage with disgusting stimuli in the laboratory and used two measures that assess behavioural and affective or cognitive components of attitudes towards disgust. As predicted, less negative attitudes towards disgust were associated with greater engagement with disgusting stimuli, above and beyond the current experience of disgust and the tendency to experience disgust. These findings stress the importance of attitudes towards emotions in understanding emotion-relevant behaviour.

Keywords:

• Attitudes
• Emotions
• Disgust

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Erratum

DISCLOSURE STATEMENT

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIAL

Supplementary materials is available via the “Supplementary” tab on the article’s online page (http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02699931.2015.1020049).

Notes

¹ We report how we determined our sample size, all data exclusions (if any) and all manipulations related to the current research question. The study included some unrelated tasks which are not reported here.

² Using G*Power 3 program (Faul, Erdfelder, Lang, & Buchner, 2007) for linear multiple regression, with an effect size of 0.13 (based on Harmon-Jones et al., 2011), α = .05, 63 participants were required for a power value of .80. Given the sensitive nature of the tasks involved, we expected some participants not to complete the study, and so we targeted a slightly higher sample size.

³ Data from three participants, who failed to complete the study, were omitted from the analyses.

⁴ See Supplementary Materials for further information about the pilot study.

⁵ Results remained the same when using mean scores instead of sum.

⁶ By deleting the item “I like thinking about sad things” α increased to .69. Analyses remained unchanged when using the more reliable subscale.

⁷ When adding gender as a predictor to the analysis, gender was not a significant predictor, and the results remained unchanged.

⁸ Results were consistent when compliance was included in the first step, and the disgust measures were included in the second step of the regression.

⁹ Similar results were obtained when using only the subset of items included in the DS-R (e.g., Olatunji et al., 2007).

¹⁰ See Supplementary Materials.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Israel Science Foundation [grant number 794/11].