New research carried out by psychologists at the University has shown for the first time that a decision to express disgust or anger depends on the motives a person seeks to communicate.
Previous studies have suggested that the emotion of disgust originally evolved to protect people from infectious disease; people don’t generally eat rotten meat, crawling with maggots, because they feel disgusted by the prospect.
But disgust is also associated with immorality and Kent Psychology PhD student Tom Kupfer and Professor Roger Giner-Sorolla set out to establish why this should be, given its disparate origins in disease avoidance.
One prominent answer has been that people are disgusted by immoral acts that lead to feelings of contamination or impurity, but this view is difficult to reconcile with the observation that people also say that they are disgusted by acts like stealing, bullying or cheating.
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