Just an anger synonym? Moral context influences predictors of disgust word use

Abstract

Do verbal reports of disgust in moral situations correspond to the concept of disgust as measured by other means, or are they used metaphorically to refer to anger? In this experiment, participants read scenarios describing a violation of a norm either about the use of the body (bodily-moral) or about harm and rights (socio-moral). They then expressed disgust and anger on verbal scales, and alternate representations of these emotion concepts were assessed through facial expression endorsement measures. When socio-moral norms were violated, anger words strongly predicted disgust words, and the separate role of disgust face endorsement was low, although significant. When bodily norms were violated, the predictive role of anger words roughly equaled the role of disgust face endorsements. Angry faces, however, never predicted disgust words independently of anger words. These results support a middle ground position in which disgust words concerning socio-moral violations are not entirely a metaphor for anger and bear some relationship to other representations of disgust. At the same time, however, the use of disgust language is more strongly related to anger language, and less strongly related to facial representations of disgust, for socio-moral versus bodily-moral violations.

Bodily moral disgust: What it is, how it is different from anger, and why it is an unreasoned emotion.

“…Research within our lab suggests that disgust in response to non-bodily violations is more related to anger than disgust in response to bodily-moral violations, even if it may not be completely explicable by the metaphorical use of "disgust" to mean "anger." Our general finding is that non-bodily violations may appear to cause an increase in the use of the word "disgust," its synonyms, and other expressions of disgust, but when anger is controlled for, this increase is greatly reduced (Giner-Sorolla, Bosson, Caswell, & Hettinger, in press ;Gutierrez & Giner-Sorolla, 2007;Gutierrez, Giner-Sorolla, & Vasiljevic, 2012;Russell & Giner-Sorolla, 2011a). By contrast, bodily violations show an increase in reports of disgust even when anger is controlled for, and disgust in this context shows unique characteristics, such as inflexibility and lack of external justifications (Russell & Giner-Sorolla, 2011b c).…”

“…Hitting someone in the nose without reason, for example, may involve the body, but it is seen as wrong because it causes unjustified harm, not because it is taboo to touch one's fist to another person's nose. More generally, when "disgust" terms are used to condemn any kind of action that do not involve violation of categorical bodily norms, this usage is more closely linked to the semantic use of anger terms (Gutierrez, Giner-Sorolla, & Vasiljevic, 2012). Of course, some violations, such as sex with children, are both categorically abnormal -creating disgust -and harmful to a person and his or her rights -creating anger.…”

Core disgust is attenuated by ingroup relations

“…There may be connections between these, but it is generally recognized that they differ from each other along a number of dimensions (14). For instance, moral disgust is more akin to anger (15); "core" and moral disgust are associated with different patterns of autonomic response (16). More generally, Tybur et al (17,18) propose that the different types of disgust have different distal determinants and are proximally associated with different information processing systems.…”

On Disgust and Moral Judgments: A Review

“…Although previous work proposed that both types of transgressions are similar to each other, there are studies that suggest the existence of important differences between the two. In terms of similarity, the way people experience moral and physical disgust is sufficiently akin that they will describe both kinds of stimuli as ' disgusting' (e.g., Simpson et al, 2006) and pair them both with facial signs of disgust that indicate a bad taste or smell (e.g., Chapman et al, 2009;Gutierrez, Giner-Sorolla, & Vasiljevic, 2012). Furthermore, both moral and physical disgust trigger shared features of the classical disgust expression (e.g., Cannon et al, 2011;Chapman et al, 2009).…”

“…However, using words such as 'grossed out' and 'revulsion' elicits recalls of physical disgust (Nabi, 2002). Thus, verbal self-reports of disgust toward moral violations are substantially predicted by verbal self-reports of anger (Gutierrez et al, 2012). Even though it might be easily to assume that disgust and anger often occur together, it might also very well be that participants who are Englishspeaking make use of these two words interchangeably (Nabi, 2002).…”