Differential involvement of the senses in disgust memories.

One prediction derived from the disease avoidance account of disgust is that proximal disgust cues (smells, tastes and touches) should elicit this emotion more intensely than distal disgust cues (sights and sounds). If correct, then memories of disgusting experiences should involve smelling, tasting or touching to a greater degree than seeing or hearing. Two surveys were conducted on university students to test this idea, drawing upon their naturalistic experiences.

Olfactory Cues of Naturally Occurring Systemic Inflammation: A Pilot Study of Seasonal Allergy.

Introduction: In an attempt to avoid contact with infectious individuals, humans likely respond to generalized rather than specific markers of disease. Humans may thus perceive a noninfectious individual as socially less attractive if they look (e.g.

Facial disgust in response to touches, smells, and tastes.

Disgust serves to defend the body from the entry of toxins and disease. Central to this function is a strong relationship with the proximate senses of smell, taste, and touch. Theory suggests that distinct and reflexive facial movements should be evoked by gustatory and olfactory disgusts, serving to impede bodily entry.

Interoceptive hunger, eating attitudes and beliefs.

Interoceptive individual differences have garnered interest because of their relationship with mental health. One type of individual difference that has received little attention is variability in the sensation/s that are understood to mean a particular interoceptive state, something that may be especially relevant for hunger. We examined if interoceptive hunger is multidimensional and idiosyncratic, if it is reliable, and if it is linked to dysfunctional eating and beliefs about the causes of hunger.

Love and affectionate touch toward romantic partners all over the world.

Touch is the primary way people communicate intimacy in romantic relationships, and affectionate touch behaviors such as stroking, hugging and kissing are universally observed in partnerships all over the world. Here, we explored the association of love and affectionate touch behaviors in romantic partnerships in two studies comprising 7880 participants. In the first study, we used a cross-cultural survey conducted in 37 countries to test whether love was universally associated with affectionate touch behaviors.

The development of interoceptive hunger signals.

Hunger is often reported when people experience certain internal sensations (e.g., fatigue) or when they anticipate that a food will be good to eat.

What's in a name? Role of verbal context in touch.

Can a name (i.e. verbal context) change how we react to and perceive an object? This question has been addressed several times for chemosensory objects, but appears unanswered for touch.

Effects of sickness manipulation on disgust and pleasantness in interpersonal touch.

The theory of the behavioral immune system (BIS) describes a set of behaviors that protect the individual from infectious diseases and that are motivated by disgust and the perceived vulnerability to disease. As interpersonal touch is one of the most common situations of potential transmission of infectious diseases in our everyday life, it seems likely that being touched by an apparently sick individual activates disgust. Our aim was to determine if risk of contamination from interpersonal touch alters the pleasantness of interpersonal touch and modulates facially expressed emotions.

Recollections about food when hungry and sated.

Memory processes may have several roles in appetite regulation. Here we examine one such role, derived from the animal literature, in which satiety cues lead to the inhibition of rewarding food-related memories. We tested this idea over three studies (n's of 58, 67, 50 respectively), by presenting participants with visual or verbal food cues, and asking them to describe what these foods were like to eat.

Interpersonal distancing preferences, touch behaviors to strangers, and country-level early dynamics of SARS-CoV-2 spread.

The recent Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic has led to "social distancing" recommendations from public health organizations, as physical closeness bears the risk of person-to-person Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) transmission. Here, it was explored if interpersonal distance preferences and touch behaviors in 41 countries were valid measures of physical distancing in contacts between strangers and whether they related to country-level variation in early dynamics of SARS-CoV-2 spread. The analysis, based on aggregated data from more than 9,000 participants, showed that variation in early dynamics of SARS-CoV-2 spread (i.

Tactile disgust: Post-contact can be more disgusting than contact.

Several studies have examined if disgust can be evoked by contacting an object-yet none have examined if reported disgust changes when the hand leaves the object. This is surprising given that post-contact tactile disgust is probably a driver of hand hygiene. We examined contact and post-contact tactile disgust and its sensory origins.

Affective Interpersonal Touch in Close Relationships: A Cross-Cultural Perspective.

Interpersonal touch behavior differs across cultures, yet no study to date has systematically tested for cultural variation in affective touch, nor examined the factors that might account for this variability. Here, over 14,000 individuals from 45 countries were asked whether they embraced, stroked, kissed, or hugged their partner, friends, and youngest child during the week preceding the study. We then examined a range of hypothesized individual-level factors (sex, age, parasitic history, conservatism, religiosity, and preferred interpersonal distance) and cultural-level factors (regional temperature, parasite stress, regional conservatism, collectivism, and religiosity) in predicting these affective-touching behaviors.

The Impact of the Covid-19 Pandemic on Disgust Sensitivity.

There have been few tests of whether exposure to naturalistic or experimental disease-threat inductions alter disgust sensitivity, although it has been hypothesized that this should occur as part of disgust's disease avoidance function. In the current study, we asked Macquarie university students to complete measures of disgust sensitivity, perceived vulnerability to disease (PVD), hand hygiene behavior and impulsivity, during Australia's Covid-19 pandemic self-quarantine (lockdown) period, in March/April 2020. These data were then compared to earlier Macquarie university, and other local, and overseas student cohorts, to determine if disgust sensitivity and the other measures, were different in the lockdown sample.

Global study of variability in olfactory sensitivity.

Variability in human olfactory sensitivity has been attributed to individual-level factors such as genetics, age, sex, medical history of infections and trauma, neurogenerative diseases, and emotional disorders. Scarce evidence exists on the cross-cultural variation in olfactory sensitivity. Hence, we performed 2 studies to estimate the variability in olfactory threshold as a function of location and environment.

The impact of hippocampal damage on appetitive control.

Animal data indicates the hippocampus assists appetite-regulation.  We tested this in humans, contrasting two patients (DW, JC) with hippocampal damage to controls on an appetite-regulation test conducted hungry and sated.  When hungry, controls palatable snacks and reported a desire to eat them, a memory-based judgment.

Perceptual and cognitive determinants of tactile disgust.

Tactile cues are said to be potent elicitors of disgust and reliable markers of disease. Despite this, no previous study had explored what the full range of tactile properties are that cue disgust, nor how interpretation of these sensations influences disgust. To answer these questions, participants were asked to touch nine objects, selected to cover the range of tactile properties, and evaluate their sensory, affective, and risk-based characteristics (primarily how sick they thought the object would make them).

Cross-Modal Associations Between Real Tastes and Colors.

People make reliable and consistent matches between taste and color. However, in contrast to other cross-modal correspondences, all of the research to date has used only taste words (and often color words too), potentially limiting our understanding of how taste-color matches arise. Here, participants sampled the 5 basic tastes, at 3 concentration steps, and selected their best matching color from a color wheel.