What Am I Feeling?

Man eating spiders: Scary or gross?

Source: Wikimedia Commons: Harald Hoyer

Disgust’s closest relative is surely fear, and much of what we know about these emotions comes from the study of individuals who respond negatively to insects and spiders. While disgust and fear are often entangled, psychologists have developed some clever methods to tease them apart.

Imagine going into the kitchen for a snack, and you a spider crawling across the snickerdoodles. Sensing your movement, the spider dashes off the table and disappears into a heating vent. Now what? Do you shrug and eat a cookie; do you give the cookie a perfunctory wipe and munch away, or do you throw away the cookies?

The spider-cookie test is a simple approach to figuring out whether people are merely afraid of spiders. If so, they’ll eat the cookie once the spider is gone. No spider, no fear, no problem. However, if they are disgusted by spiders, even once the creature has left, its contaminating qualities linger—and the cookie remains repulsive.

Another way of teasing apart fear and disgust involves dissecting our aversive responses to animals, which are driven by the possibility of being attacked and contaminated. Big creatures are likely to eat us and little creatures are likely to sicken us. We associate pain with predators and illness with nasty animals.

In a carefully controlled experiment, arachnophobic individuals were asked to estimate the probability that an image of a particular creature would be followed by an electric shock (pain) or a sip of nauseating juice (disgust). Pit bulls were associated with a painful outcome and maggots with a nasty outcome. And spiders? People anticipated both outcomes, undermining the neat fear/disgust or danger/contamination dichotomy.

Fear is not the only psychological relative of disgust. An extended family of emotions has been analyzed by psychologists. To begin, there is contempt which is generally taken to be associated with superiority (maggots are not our equals).

Abhorrence is a close cousin of disgust but differs in terms of immediacy. When we encounter the cockroach disgust is instantaneous. But as we search for the can of insecticide, we might well work ourselves into a state of abhorrence.

Next it is certainly possible for people to hate mosquitoes, for example. However, hatred can pertain to almost anything, while disgust is associated with organic aspects of the world.

Love, which would appear to have nothing in common but may the closest relative. While disgust functions to mark the boundaries of oneself, love holds the trump card. Simply put, sexual love allows us to make babies and non-sexual love allows us to change their diapers.

Entomologists engage insects with a kind of physical and psychological closeness that many people find hard to imagine—but perhaps no more difficult to understand than a bachelor attempting to comprehend how a father can wipe his child’s nose without disgust. Yes, both creepy insects and messy kids can infest our minds.