Disgust

Disgust is usually characterized as a strong negative emotion, more concretely as an aversion accompanied by intense, even violent, bodily reactions. The bodily aspects of disgust are taken to include nose wrinkling, retraction of the upper lip, gaping, convulsions, gagging and nausea. Many theorists contend that such bodily tendencies are universally shared by all humans (or primates more generally) (cf. Demmerling and Landweer 2007, 93–95). The putative fact is explained ontogenetically by early child-development and phylogenetically by the mechanisms of species evolution (e.g., Darwin 1872; Rozin and Fallon 1987; Rozin et al. 1993, 757). This does not entail that all human beings in all cultures and at all times would reject the same objects as disgusting, but merely that when humans reject something as disgusting, they do so by the same or very similar facial gestures and bodily movements. ¹