51. P. Rozin, M. Markwith, and C. Stoess, “Moralization and Becoming a Vegetarian: The Transformation of Preferences into Values and the Recruitment of Disgust,” Psychological Science 8 (1997).
52. P. J. de Jong et al., “Disgust and Sexual Problems—Theoretical Conceptualization and Case Illustrations,” International Journal of Cognitive Therapy 3, no. 1 (2010); C. Borg, P. J. de Jong, and W. W. Schultz, “Vaginismus and Dyspareunia: Automatic vs. Deliberate Disgust Responsivity,” Journal of Sexual Medicine 7, no. 6 (2010).
53. De Jong et al., “Disgust and Sexual Problems.”
54. S. Fry and U. Blumenbach, Paperweight (London: Arrow, 2004).
55. W. O. Monteiro et al., “Anorgasmia from Clomipramine in Obsessive Compulsive Disorder: A Controlled Trial,” British Journal of Psychiatry 151 (1987).
56. R. Sprengelmeyer et al., “Disgust in Pre-Clinical Huntington’s Disease: A Longitudinal Study,” Neuropsychologia 44, no. 4 (2006).
57. C. May-Chahal and R. Antrobus, “Engaging Community Support in Safeguarding Adults from Self-Neglect,” British Journal of Social Work 42 (2011).
58. T. Dalgleish and M. J. Power, “Emotion-Specific and Emotion-Non-Specific Components of Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD): Implications for a Taxonomy of Related Psychopathology,” Behaviour Research and Therapy 42 (2004).
59. B. O. Olatunji et al., “Mental Pollution and PTSD Symptoms in Victims of Sexual Assault: A Preliminary Examination of the Mediating Role of Trauma-Related Cognitions,” Journal of Cognitive Psychotherapy 22, no. 1 (2008).
60. De Jong et al., “Disgust and Sexual Problems.”
61. P. J. de Jong and M. L. Peters, “Sex and the Sexual Dysfunctions: The Role of Disgust and Contamination Sensitivity,” in Disgust and Its Disorders: Theory, Assessment, and Treatment, ed. B. O. Olatunji and D. McKay (Washington, DC: American Psychological Association, 2009).
62. Tolin, Worhunsky, and Maltby, “Sympathetic Magic.”
63. De Jong et al., “Disgust and Sexual Problems.”
64. Rubio-Godoy, Aunger, and Curtis, “Serotonin.”
65. De Barra, “Attraction and Aversion.”
66. M. Ridley, The Origins of Virtue (London: Viking, 1996); R. Wright, The Moral Animal: Why We Are the Way We Are; The New Science of Evolutionary Psychology (London: Vintage, 1995); J. Haidt, The Happiness Hypothesis: Putting Ancient Wisdom and Philosophy to the Test of Modern Science (London: Heinemann, 2007); Joyce, Evolution of Morality.
67. Jonathan Haidt, in his book The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion, points out that the Right focuses on the broad domain of morality in general, while the Left tends to be concerned much more closely with the rights of minorities. He suggests that it is time for the Left to reappropriate discussion of the big moral issues facing the majority about how it is best that we live.
68. Y. Inbar et al., “Disgust Sensitivity Predicts Intuitive Disapproval of Gays,” Emotion 9, no. 3 (2009); K. Shanmugarajah et al., “The Role of Disgust Emotions in the Observer Response to Facial Disfigurement,” Body Image 9 (2012); de Barra, “Attraction and Aversion.”
69. D. Livingstone-Smith, Less Than Human: Why We Demean, Enslave and Exterminate Others (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2011).
70. V. Curtis, “The Dangers of Dirt: Household Hygiene and Health” (PhD diss., Wageningen Agricultural University, 1998). Steven Pinker has recently argued that one of the reasons for the decline in violence in recent history is the advance in hygiene. He suggests that it was easier to visit violence on someone who was repulsively dirty. S. Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined (New York: Penguin Books, 2011).
71. K. E. Taylor, Cruelty: Human Evil and the Human Brain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009).
72. J. Charteris-Black, “Britain as a Container: Immigration Metaphors in the 2005 Election Campaign,” Discourse and Society 17, no. 5 (2006); S. I. Wilkinson, Votes and Violence: Electoral Competition and Ethnic Riots in India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006).
73. Livingstone-Smith, Less Than Human.
74. L. Kass, “The Wisdom of Repugnance,” New Republic 216, no. 22 (1997).
75. There is a major philosophical argument about whether one can determine what “ought to be” from what “is.” I’m with Sam Harris, that we have an obligation to investigate the conditions that can enhance the flourishing of conscious beings. Harris, Moral Landscape. On moral progress, see also Steven Pinker’s masterwork on the decline of violence: The Better Angels of Our Nature (London: Penguin, 2011).
76. P. Singer, The Expanding Circle: Ethics and Sociobiology (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1981).
77. Livingstone-Smith, Less Than Human.
Epilogue
1. One of the reasons why psychology can’t advance in the way that other sciences have is its continued failure to pin down and agree on its fundamental units of analysis—in brains or behavior. R. Aunger and V. Curtis, “Kinds of Behaviour,” Biology and Philosophy 23, no. 3 (2008): 317–45.
2. Segerstråle, Defenders of the Truth; Laland and Brown, Sense and Nonsense.
3. There may of course be rare exceptions. Perhaps some extremophiles, animals in isolated niches where there is no competition from parasites, or animals with powerful physiological armor can do away with the need for behavioral avoidance of parasites.
4. Of course, the ways in which our living relative species “do” disgust will be quite varied, since many years have gone by for modifications to accumulate on each branch of the tree since the last common ancestor.
5. Borg, Lieberman, and Kiehl, “Infection, Incest, and Iniquity”; Lieberman, Tooby, and Cosmides, “Human Kin Detection”; J. M. Tybur, D. Lieberman, and V. Griskevicius, “Microbes, Mating, and Morality: Individual Differences in Three Functional Domains of Disgust,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 97, no. 1 (2009).
6. Marsiglio, “Attitudes toward Homosexual Activity.”
7. Isaksen, “Toward a Sociology of (Gendered) Disgust Images”; Ariely, Predictably Irrational; Shanmugarajah et al., “Role of Disgust Emotions.”
8. B. Charlton, Psychiatry and the Human Condition (Oxford: Radcliffe Medical Press, 2000).
9. The approach is set out in more detail in Aunger and Curtis, “Kinds of Behaviour.”
10. It’s been proposed that men roll away after sex so as not get too high a dose of pair-bond-promoting oxytocin.
11. For example, components of the love system might include striving to be with the object of affection, sacrificing individual needs for the sake of the other, vigilance for rivals and chasing them away, and threatening serious consequences should a partner stray. Factor Analysis (and, eventually, high-resolution brain scanning) could help to distinguish the subcomponents of the love adaptive system.
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