ArticlePhilosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences2018
The structure and function of pathogen disgust.
Article in Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences, 2018. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 20 papers.
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Who cites it
20 citing papers in PubMed, 63 citations in OpenAlex.
- Trial
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- Exploring the overuse of non-sterile gloves in operating theatres: a cross-sectional survey and interview study.BMJ open · 2026Article
- Article
- Disgust sensitivity and psychopathic behavior: A narrative review.Translational neuroscience · 2024Review
- Yikes! The Effect of Incidental Disgust and Information on Public Attitudes During the COVID-19 Pandemic.Political psychology · 2022Article
- Pseudo-Contamination and Memory: Is There a Memory Advantage for Objects Touched by "Morphologically Deviant People"?Evolutionary psychological science · 2022Article
- The behavioral immune system in action: Psychological correlates of pathogen disgust sensitivity in healthcare professionals working in a COVID-19 hospital.Physiology & behavior · 2022Article
- The evolution of the human healthcare system and implications for understanding our responses to COVID-19.Evolution, medicine, and public health · 2022Review
- The effect of the COVID-19 pandemic on disgust sensitivity in a sample of UK adults.Frontiers in public health · 2022Article
- The relationship between meat disgust and meat avoidance-A chicken-and-egg problem.Frontiers in nutrition · 2022Article
- Broadening the ecology of fear: non-lethal effects arise from diverse responses to predation and parasitism.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2021Article
- Specificity of spiders among fear- and disgust-eliciting arthropods: Spiders are special, but phobics not so much.PloS one · 2021Article
- Epidemiological transitions in human evolution and the richness of viruses, helminths, and protozoa.Evolution, medicine, and public health · 2021Article
- Infection threat shapes our social instincts.Behavioral ecology and sociobiology · 2021Review
- Pharyngeal Detection ofInternational journal of environmental research and public health · 2020Article
- Divergent strategies in faeces avoidance between two cercopithecoid primates.Royal Society open science · 2020Article
- Mating avoidance in female olive baboons (Science advances · 2019Article
- How can we improve identification of contagious individuals? Factors influencing sickness detection.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2018Article
- Evolution of pathogen and parasite avoidance behaviours.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2018Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
2 authors at 2 institutions in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Researchers have long noted that many of the multiple elicitors of disgust have some relation to infectious disease. There is an emerging consensus that disgust evolved in Animalia to direct the behaviours that reduce risk of infection, so-called 'parasite avoidance theory'. If this is correct, then the disgust motive should be structured in a manner that reflects the ways in which infectious disease can be avoided. In this study, we generated a set of items based on the epidemiology of disease transmission. These were then rated for their capacity to elicit disgust by a large, predominantly North American/UK sample and subjected to factor analysis to identify latent variables. While a number of plausible factor solutions emerged, Velicer's MAP (minimum average partial) test suggested six domains: atypical appearance, lesions, sex, hygiene, food and animals. This structure did not exactly mirror the transmission routes of infections, as we initially predicted, but it may rather reflect distinct kinds of behavioural tasks involved in avoiding disease. This finding makes sense from the perspective of a cognitive system that evolved under selection for a behavioural response to threats from the social and biological environment. We suggest that regularly occurring types of infectious disease problems have produced regularities in the domain structure of
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Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.