ArticleScientific reports2023
Pandemic elevates sensitivity to moral disgust but not pathogen disgust.
Article in Scientific reports, 2023. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 2 papers.
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Who cites it
2 citing papers in PubMed, 14 citations in OpenAlex.
- Effects of Spicy Food on Sense of Fairness: Mediating Effects of Aggression and Pathogen Avoidance.PsyCh journal · 2025Article
- Human emotional evaluation of ancestral and modern threats: fear, disgust, and anger.Frontiers in psychology · 2023Article
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Authors and funding
5 authors at 2 institutions in 2 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
The behavioral immune system, with disgust as its motivational part, serves as the first line of defense in organisms' protection against pathogens. Laboratory studies indicate that disgust sensitivity adaptively adjusts to simulated environmental threat, but whether disgust levels similarly change in response to real-life threats, such as a pandemic, remains largely unknown. In a preregistered within-subject study, we tested whether the threat posed by the Covid-19 pandemic would lead to increased perceived disgust. The perception of threat was induced by testing during two phases of the Covid-19 pandemic (periods of high vs. low pathogen threat). We found heightened levels of moral disgust during a "wave" of the pandemic, but the effect was not observed in the domain of pathogen or sexual disgust. Moreover, the age of respondents and levels of trait anxiety were positively associated with pathogen and moral disgust, suggesting that variation in disgust sensitivity may be based chiefly on stable characteristics.
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