Have you ever wondered why the saliva, sexual secretions, feces, lack of hygiene or even spoiled food could trigger the feeling of disgust? Well, this is to protect you from a potential infection from which these substances are the source. Indeed this feeling of disgust will keep you away from it and thus reduce the risk of infection! A study, carried out by researchers at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine (England), has shed light on this phenomenon. The results appeared in the newspaper Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B.
The researchers interviewed more than 2,600 people, an average of 28 years old. They were faced with 75 different potentially disgusting scenarios. This ranged from people with obvious signs of infection, to objects teeming with insects to listening to a sneeze. Participants were asked to rate the strength of their reaction using a scale ranging from “no disgust” to “extreme disgust”. Infected wounds producing pus and violation of hygienic standards – such as having a bad smell bodily, were found to be particularly disgusting.
Six categories of disgust
In general, the researchers identified 6 categories of disgust, each reporting a type of infectious disease that occurred during the history: an atypical appearance (deformities or abnormal behavior), lesions (blister, boil, pus), gender, hygiene, food (signs of deterioration) and animals such as rats and mosquito, known to be vectors of disease.
Historically, eating rotten food can transmit the cholera, close contact with unhygienic people could have transmitted leprosy, multiple sexual relations, syphilisand contact with open wounds or rats, Plague. Interestingly, generally women were more “disgusted” than men. The researchers explain this by the fact that men are known to behave more at risk, on average. This feeling of disgust is ultimately quite common in animals, so researchers believe it is evolutionarily very old.
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