Physiological and self-reported disgust reactions to obesity

ABSTRACT

There is accumulating evidence that disgust plays an important role in prejudice toward individuals with obesity, but that research is primarily based on self-reported emotions. In four studies, we examined whether participants displayed a physiological marker of disgust (i.e. levator labii activity recorded using facial electromyography) in response to images of obese individuals, and whether these responses corresponded with their self-reported disgust to those images. All four studies showed the predicted self-reported disgust response toward images of obese individuals. Study 1 further showed that participants exhibited more levator activity to images of obese individuals than to neutral images. However, Studies 2–4 failed to provide any evidence that the targets’ body size affected levator responses. These findings suggest that disgust may operate at multiple levels, and that the disgust response to images of obese individuals may be more of a cognitive-conceptual one than a physiological one.

KEYWORDS:

• Obesity
• weight stigma
• disgust
• facial EMG

Acknowledgments

The authors wish to thank Robert Carels for providing the images used in Study 3.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 An additional measure of participants’ emotional response to the target stimuli was included in all studies. For each image, participants were asked to select from an array of facial expressions of emotion the one that most closely corresponded to the emotion they felt when they initially saw the image. Because that measure does not provide information about participants’ disgust response to all targets, and therefore does not address the questions we pose in this paper, that measure was not analysed.

2 As part of a larger project, participants also provided self-reports of stereotypes and desire for social distance from the target individuals. However, those measures are unrelated to the questions addressed in the present study and are thus not reported here.

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported under Australian Research Council’s Discovery Projects funding scheme (project number DP130100759).