Native speakers of English, Korean, and Malayalam (N = 30 in each group) rated their emotional reactions to stories describing events leading to anger, fear, sadness, and disgust. Speaker's language had no significant effect for anger, fear, and sadness stories, but did for disgust stories. The category named by the English word disgust includes emotional reactions to distaste, pathogen-containing substances, blood, sex, and moral violations. The category named by disgust's translations into Korean and Malayalam were narrower, a result that challenges translation equivalence. Lack of equivalence across languages is consistent with the argument that the English word disgust refers to a heterogeneous mix of similar but different emotional reactions.Disgust has been said to be a universal human emotion, and thus the study of disgust requires translation of the word disgust into other languages. Here, we question the claim that the word disgust can be adequately translated. A lack of translation equivalents, in turn, raises a larger question about the nature of the category of emotional reactions denoted by disgust: Is that category homogeneous or heterogeneous? Could the word refer to more than one type of emotion?
No" is our answer to the question in our title. In moral psychology, a purity violation (defined as an immoral act committed against one's own body or soul) was theorized to be a homogeneous moral domain qualitatively distinct from other moral domains. In contrast, we hypothesized heterogeneity rather than homogeneity, overlapping rather than distinct domains, and quantitative rather than qualitative differences from other hypothesized domains (specifically, autonomy, which is harm to others). Purity has been said to consist of norms violations of which elicit disgust and taint the soul. Here we empirically examined homogeneity: whether violations of body (e.g., eating putrid food) belong in the same moral domain as violations of the soul unrelated to bodily health (e.g., selling one's soul, desecrating sacred books). We examined distinctness: whether reactions to purity violations differ in predicted ways from those to violations of autonomy. In four studies (the last preregistered), American Internet users (in Studies 2 and 4, classified as politically conservative or liberal; Ns = 80, 96, 1,312, 376) were given stories about violations based on prior studies. Nonhealth purity violations were rated as relatively more disgusting, but less gross (the lay term for the reaction to putrid things) and more likely to taint the soul than were health-related ones. Surprisingly, both health and nonhealth purity violations were typically judged as only slightly immoral if at all. Autonomy violations were rated as more disgusting and tainting of the soul than were purity violations.
Disgust has been hypothesized to be uniquely linked to violations of a distinct moral domain (called divinity, purity, or sacred) aimed at preserving one's body from contamination with pathogens and preserving one's soul from violations of what is sacred. Here we examined whether the same emotion-core disgust-occurs when witnessing both types of violation, and we proposed a specific method for doing so. In two studies (N = 160; 240), American and Indian participants indicated their emotional reaction to (stories depicting) sacred or nonsacred violations, each either with or without pathogens. Both Americans and Indians felt "grossed out" (a term for core disgust) by events with pathogens (whether violations of the sacred or not). They felt disgusted and angered, but not grossed out, by violations of the sacred. For both Americans and Indians, grossed out was never the modal emotion when a sacred violation did not involve pathogens. Results were inconsistent with a focus on any single emotion: sacred violations were associated with several different negative emotions. (PsycINFO Database Record
Do different languages have a translation for the English word disgust that labels the same underlying concept? If not, the English word might label a culture-specific concept. Four studies (Ns = 93, 90, 180, 960) compared disgust to its common translation in Hindi (an Indo-European language) and in Malayalam (a Dravidian language) by examining two components of the concept thought of as a script: causal antecedent and facial expression. The English word was used to refer to reactions to both unclean substances and moral violations; Hindi and Malayalam translations referred mainly to moral violations. Speakers of all three languages associated different facial expressions to unclean substances and moral violations. Words for disgust in the three languages failed a test of translation equivalence (a correlation of .80 or above across emotional facial expressions).
Six studies (Ns = 65, 96, 120, 129, 40, 200) tested the hypothesis that being reminded of our animal nature makes us feel disgust. Participants from three cultural groups indicated the intensity of their disgust reactions to pleasant and unpleasant animal reminder stories and pictures as well as to a statement directly reminding them of their animal nature. Findings did not support the hypothesis: Pleasant animal reminders reminded respondents of their animal nature (even more powerfully than did unpleasant ones), but were not disgusting. The direct reminder of our animal nature was not disgusting. There was no significant correlation between disgust and being reminded of animal nature for disgusting (unpleasant) animal reminders. Thus, some disgusting events remind us of our animal nature, but they are not disgusting because they remind us of our animal nature. Animal reminders per se are not disgusting.
On the assumption that shame is a universal emotion, cross-cultural research on shame relies on translations assumed to be equivalent in meaning. Our studies here questioned that assumption. In three studies (Ns, 108, 120, 117), shame was compared to its translations in Spanish (vergüenza) and in Malayalam (nanakedu). American English speakers used shame for the emotional reaction to moral failures and its use correlated positively with guilt, whereas vergüenza and nanakedu were used less for moral stories and their use correlated less with the guilt words. In comparison with Spanish and Malayalam speakers’ ratings of their translations, American English speakers rated shame and guilt to be more similar to each other.
Much theory, research, and application regarding emotion is based on a set of basic emotions. But the question remains: which emotions are in that set? One proposal is to expand the classic set of six with 12 new ones, each indicated by a facial expression purported to convey that one specific emotion universally. A series of studies offered as support for this proposal relied on presenting participants with the emotion label embedded in a story and then asking them to choose among four facial expressions or none. Here we critique that response procedure (used in various studies) as confounding emotion with story. Our Study 1 (N ϭ 1,230 residents of the United States) found that the same response procedure could "show" that the facial expressions used in that previous research convey emotions other than the ones that had been proposed. Our Study 2 (N ϭ 64 in India and N ϭ 56 in China) found similar results with participants who speak non-Indo-European languages (Malayalam and Mandarin). Altogether, our results question whether the proposed set of new basic emotions is warranted, given problems in the response procedure in which an emotion is embedded in a story.
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