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The threat of diseases varies considerably among individuals, and it has been found to be linked to various proactive or reactive behaviors. In the present studies, we investigated the impact of individual differences in the perceived vulnerability to disease (PVD) on social touch before (Study 1) or during the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic (Study 2). We also investigated the influence of personality traits in the covariation between these two dimensions. We found that people who are the most disease-avoidant are also the most reluctant to touching or being touched by others (and this relationship holds when personality traits are taken into account). Interestingly, the association between PVD and social touch increased during the COVID-19 pandemic compared with a few months before. By showing that the fear of contamination has an association with social touch, the findings provide further evidence for the behavioral immune system ( Schaller and Park, 2011 ), a psychological system acting as a first line of defense against pathogens.

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Disgust is a basic emotion which protects individuals from potential contamination. It is hypothesized that disgust evolved primarily as a mechanism against oral contamination or as a strategy against disease infections in general. We investigated visual attention to disgusting oral (rotten food) and non-oral (e.g., a tick) and control (e.g., a gull), nondisgusting stimuli using a touch-screen paradigm with a sample of 60 adult participants in Slovakia. We found that disgusting pictures trig-gered visual attention more than control pictures and that visual attention was not related to an individual's sensitivity to pathogen disgust. Although participants identified disgusting food items quicker than nondisgusting food pictures, these differences did not reach statistical significance. Findings in this study suggest that the evolution of disgust could have been originally favoured by the repulsion of contaminated food, but the benefits from disease avoidance were soon extended to disgust sensitivity to pathogens that threaten our bodies using non-oral entry points.