Concept
Disgust
Overview
Disgust (Middle French: desgouster, from Latin gustus, 'taste') is an emotional response of rejection or revulsion to something potentially contagious or something considered offensive, distasteful or unpleasant. In The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, Charles Darwin wrote that disgust is a sensation that refers to something revolting. Disgust is experienced primarily in relation to the sense of taste (either perceived or imagined), and secondarily to anything which causes a similar feeling by sense of smell, touch, or vision. Musically sensitive people may even be disgusted by the cacophony of inharmonious sounds. Research has continually proven a relationship between disgust and anxiety disorders such as arachnophobia, blood-injection-injury type phobias, and contamination fear related obsessive–compulsive disorder (also known as OCD).
Disgust is one of the basic emotions of Robert Plutchik's theory of emotions, and has been studied extensively by Paul Rozin. It invokes a characteristic facial expression, one of Paul Ekman's six universal facial expressions of emotion. Unlike the emotions of fear, anger, and sadness, disgust is associated with a decrease in heart rate (for body-envelope violations) and proto-nausea of the stomach (for bodily effluvia).
Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).
Possible passages
Found by search and not yet checked by a person; they may only mention the idea in passing.
All too small, even the greatest man!—that was my disgust at man! And the eternal return also of the smallest man!—that was my disgust at all existence! Ah, Disgust! Disgust! Disgust!—Thus spake Zarathustra, and sighed and shuddered; for he remembered his sickness. Then did his animals prevent him from speaking further. “Do not speak further, thou convalescent!”—so answered his animals, “but go out where the world…
Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra
Names Disgust several times; the author is tied to Disgust in the knowledge graph.
These movements were accompanied by a little shudder. It was all the more comical, as I doubt whether the child felt real disgust—the eyes and forehead expressing much surprise and consideration. The protrusion of the tongue in letting a nasty object fall out of the mouth, may explain how it is that lolling out the tongue universally serves as a sign of contempt and hatred.[1111] We have now seen that scorn…
Charles Darwin, The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals
States what Disgust is; names Disgust several times.
But the will to combat the violence of a craving is beyond our power, equally with the method we adopt and the success we may have in applying it. In all this process our intellect is rather merely the blind instrument of another rival craving, whether it be the impulse to repose, or the fear of disgrace and other evil consequences, or love. While “we” thus imagine that we are complaining of the violence of an…
Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, The Dawn of Day
The author is tied to Disgust in the knowledge graph; names Disgust twice.
Related ideas
- Emotion
- Friedrich Nietzsche
- Fear
- Guilt (emotion)
- Jonathan Haidt
- Hindi
- Hygiene
- John Stuart Mill
- Jean-Paul Sartre
- Latin
- Personality
- Bioethics
- Hatred
- Social relation
- Visual perception
- Conservatism in the United States
- Sense
- Boredom
- Rat
- Self-consciousness
- Snake
- Bible
- Martha Nussbaum
- Morality
Place in the tradition
Part of Evolution of morality.