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‘Out, damned spot!’
Published in Alan Bleakley, Educating Doctors’ Senses Through the Medical Humanities, 2020
Disgust is a response to the abject – something that is unwanted, rejected, cast off as terrible, including treating persons themselves as abject (to be excluded from society). In this chapter, I focus primarily not on the subjects of medical education (medical students and doctors), nor on the objects and objectives (patient care and safety), but rather on the abject and its management – or rather, potential mis-management.
Perspectives on olfaction in medical culture
Published in Alan Bleakley, Routledge handbook of the medical humanities, 2019
However illogical and undesirable this perception, its influence is acknowledged in representations of the development of the trainee clinician. To be repulsed by stenches is an understandable human reaction, but although almost irresistible, it must be transcended by the doctor, in the same way that healthcare professionals must guard against exhibiting inappropriate reactions of fear, guilt and other negative emotions. This ability to repress or screen an involuntary response to malodour is, George Kazantzidis argues, a prevalent feature of Hippocratic medical writings: None of these texts mention disgust, nor do they contain the faintest hint at the difficulties that a doctor is facing when, during clinical examination, he must taste for instance, the blood or bile in a sick person’s vomit [. . .] the words used to indicate that something, for instance, smells bad reveal a clinical attitude that often avoids the use of charged vocabulary.(Lateiner and Spatharas 2017: 56)
Murder as an attempt to manage self-disgust
Published in David Jones, Working with Dangerous People, 2018
To summarise, disgust is an affect probably originally founded in response to bad tastes and smells with their link to spoiled food and over the ages generalised to certain tactile experiences, sliminess for example, and further extended to thoughts of something expected to be disgusting. The development of disgust seems to be culturally related, is easily transferred and now includes not just threat to the body but threat to the soul or core self.8 Furthermore, it features in interpersonal relationships, where it is experienced as a response to others. Characteristically it entails a powerful emotional or physical rejection of someone felt to be threatening an invasion of the self. It may be expressed through rejection, attacking or nauseated tolerance.4 The disgusting object is believed to be tainted, damaged and irreparable.
Gayzing Women’s Bodies: Criticisms of Labia Depend on the Gender and Sexual Orientation of Perceivers
Published in The Journal of Sex Research, 2023
Flora Oswald, Cory L. Pedersen, Jes L. Matsick
With regard to prejudice toward women, it is important to note that we do not empirically address here how disgust – particularly gay men’s disgust – toward women’s genitalia is enacted in prejudiced behavior. This remains an open empirical question; for example, one could test whether individual differences in labial disgust among gay men predict prejudiced attitudes toward women, or whether priming gay men with images of “disgusting” labia influences their subsequent behavior toward women. Based on the current findings, we do not claim that disgust is inherently a prejudiced experience; rather, we theorize that this disgust is likely to be linked to prejudice. We ground this argument in existing evidence indicating links between disgust responses and prejudiced behavior (e.g., Kiss et al., 2020).
Child Sexual Abuse and the Moralization of Purity
Published in Journal of Child Sexual Abuse, 2020
Mattan D. Arden, Sharon Rabinovitz
In the field of moral emotions, recent empirical studies have associated disgust with the moralization of purity by conceptualizing disgust as a moral emotion defined by appraisals of purity and contamination (Haidt, 2003; Rozin & Fallon, 1987). Lerner and Keltner (2000, 2001) proposed a model, The Appraisal-Tendency Framework, which presupposes that each emotion is defined by a core appraisal and that emotion influences judgments in domains that are thematically related to the eliciting appraisal. Fear, for example, is an emotion that amplifies judgments with some degree of uncertainty and uncontrollability, whereas disgust is an emotion that contributes to moralization of purity violations and virtues. Given that thesis, by using three studies with different methodologies, Horberg et al. (2009) have found that an experience of disgust is associated with higher moral evaluations of purity behaviors and that disgust is associated with judgments of pure and impure behaviors but not with judgments of just or unjust, or harmful or caregiving behaviors. They concluded that disgust seems to be uniquely associated with purity concerns and not with concerns in the realms of justice or harm/care.
A Meta-Analytic Review of the Association Between Disgust and Prejudice Toward Gay Men
Published in Journal of Homosexuality, 2020
Mark J. Kiss, Melanie A. Morrison, Todd G. Morrison
Within the realm of emotions and prejudice, researchers have allocated attention to the study of disgust, operationalized as an individual difference variable (i.e., disgust sensitivity) or as an induced state, and prejudice toward sexual minority persons (typically, gay men). Disgust is commonly understood as the rejection of unpleasant stimuli based on sight, smell, or even mere thought. However, it is a complicated emotion because its elicitors may originate from a variety of sources, including bodily products, sexual behaviors, animals, interpersonal contact, and moral offenses (Rozin et al., 2008). A number of disgust domains have been identified: (1) core; (2) animal-reminder; (3) interpersonal; (4) moral; and, most recently, (5) sexual (Haidt, McCauley, & Rozin, 1994; Hodson et al., 2013; Smith, 2012; Tybur, Lieberman, & Griskevicius, 2009). Each form of disgust will be outlined briefly. However, in doing so, we are not implying that these domains are orthogonal (i.e., they do not overlap).