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The Effects of Mortality Salience on Disgust Sensitivity Among University Students, Older Adults, and Mortuary Students

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The Effects of Mortality Salience on Disgust Sensitivity Among University Students, Older Adults, and Mortuary Students The Open Psychology Journal, 2010, 3, 1-8 1 Open Access The Effects of Mortality Salience on Disgust Sensitivity Among University Students, Older Adults, and Mortuary Students Jonathan F. Bassett1,* and Michael E. Sonntag2 1Department of Psychology, Lander University, USA 2University of Maine at Presque Isle, USA Abstract: The present study tested the Terror Management perspective on disgust by examining the effects of mortality salience on disgust sensitivity among 137 university students, 48 older adults, and 44 mortuary students preparing for a career in the funeral service industry. Participants were randomly assigned to a mortality salience, uncertainty salience, or television salience induction. Following a delay, participants completed the core disgust and contamination disgust sub- scales of the Disgust Scale Revised. University students reported more core disgust than did older adults and mortuary students. Women reported more core and contamination disgust than did men. Mortality salience led to increased disgust sensitivity among all three groups but only on a small number of items related to animals. The results suggest a limited role of terror management defenses in the experience of disgust in response to stimuli that remind people of their animal nature. Keywords: Terror Management Theory, Disgust Sensitivity, Mortality Salience. THE EFFECTS OF MORTALITY SALIENCE ON Disgust DISGUST SENSITIVITY AMONG UNIVERSITY STUDENTS, OLDER ADULTS, AND MORTUARY Rozin, Haidt, and McCauley [7] posited that, although disgust likely evolved as a way to protect human omnivores STUDENTS from bodily contamination through the oral incorporation of The present paper examined the effects of experimentally potentially harmful foods, the disgust mechanisms was co- inducing thoughts of death on disgust sensitivity among uni- opted through cultural evolution to protect people from con- versity students, older adults, and mortuary students. The cerns about contamination of the soul. Their position is goal of this examination was to further clarify the ongoing based on the idea that disgust is not elicited by specific sen- debate in the literature as to whether disgust is best concep- sory properties of stimuli but rather is a response to things tualized as an evolved mechanism to avoid biological threats that are ideologically offensive. If disgust were merely an such as ingesting potentially dangerous food or coming into evolved food rejection mechanism, then it should be elicited contact with infectious agents [1-4] or as a culturally con- purely by sensory properties (e.g., disgust in response to bit- structed mechanism to avoid psychological threats that re- ter taste would facilitate avoiding the ingestion of potentially mind people of their animal nature and consequently their poisonous food). However, research participants were dis- mortality [5,6]. Support for the latter position comes from gusted by the prospect of drinking a glass of their favorite findings that reminders of death increased disgust sensitivity juice that had previously come into contact with a sterilized among university students [6]. Challenges to this position roach and by the prospect of eating chocolate shaped like come from the findings that disgust sensitivity decreased dog excrement although both situations involved no unpleas- with age and that reminders of death did not increase disgust ant sensory properties [8]. sensitivity among participants with more accepting death Haidt, Rozin, McCauley, and Imada [9] recognized that attitudes [3]. The goal of the present study was to address the primacy of animals and animal products as elicitors of some methodological limitations in these previous studies disgust likely stemmed from their role in the transmission of and to offer support for the partial role of disgust as a de- parasites and infectious disease. They acquiesced that an fense against death anxiety by showing that reminders of evolutionary advantage would have been conferred to hu- death increase disgust sensitivity in response to a limited mans who were not only sensitive to the sensory properties number of stimuli even among older adults and mortuary of potential foods but also the contact history of those foods. students, both of whom typically hold more accepting death However, they suggested that the lack of disgust responses in attitudes. young children cast doubts on the adequacy of a conceptu- alization of disgust as purely an evolved mechanism for avoiding disease from ingesting dangerous food. Instead they argued that while disgust may have emerged to offer protec- *Address correspondence to this author at the Department of Psychology, Lander University, 320 Stanley Ave, Greenwood, SC 29649, USA; tion against biological threats, it is also a cultural phenome- Tel: (864) 388-8740; E-mail: jbassett@lander.edu non employed to offer protection against psychological 1874-3501/10 2010 Bentham Open 2 The Open Psychology Journal, 2010, Volume 3 Bassett and Sonntag threats. From this perspective, the ideological offensiveness In a revision of their original position, Pyszczynski, running through all disgust eliciting stimuli is based on the Greenberg, and Solomon [12] have elaborated a more com- idea that the body is a temple for the soul. Consequently, plex system of terror management mechanisms involving anything that reminds people of their purely corporeal nature two distinct defensive processes that are activated in a par- (e.g., sex, eating, bodily waste) is disgusting unless it occurs ticular temporal sequence. The first response to reminders of in the proper cultural context of rituals which attempt to death is to push them out of conscious awareness by sup- maintain the purity of the soul by distinguishing human be- pression or focusing on healthy lifestyle changes and one’s havior from that of other animals. likely longevity. This process, labeled proximal or direct defense, is successful for a while, but with delay and distrac- In developing their Disgust Scale as a measure of indi- tion death thoughts become hyper-accessible in the periphery vidual differences in disgust sensitivity, Haidt, McCauley, and Rozin [10] demonstrated that food, animals, body prod- of consciousness and threaten to reappear in conscious atten- tion and produce anxiety. It is at this point that distal or ucts, sex, body envelop violations, hygiene, and death were symbolic defenses involving self-esteem striving and cultural the main elicitors of disgust. They also identified an eighth worldview defense are utilized to dissipate the accessibility factor called Magical Thinking that referred to the operation of death thoughts and prevent them from entering conscious of the laws of sympathetic magic at work across all types of awareness. disgusting stimuli. Haidt et al. argued that the common theme running through the various elicitors of disgust was Terror Management Perspective on Disgust that they all served as reminders of the similarity between humans and animals. Consequently, they proposed that dis- Working from the perspective of Terror Management gust in response to these stimuli represented a psychological Theory, Goldenberg [5] posited that people are motivated to defense in which people attempt to avoid the awareness of distance themselves from other animals in order to quell ex- their animal nature. Haidt et al. suggested that death was the istential anxiety stemming from the uniquely human aware- strongest reminder of human’s similarity to other animals ness of death. From this perspective, disgust is a symbolic or based on the finding that disgust in response to death related distal defense activated by reminders of human corporeality stimuli was one of subscales most predictive of overall dis- and vulnerability to death. By evidencing disgust, people try gust sensitivity and overall disgust sensitivity scores were to elevate themselves above the status of other organisms in positively correlated with fear of death. However, they ac- hopes of symbolically transcending their fate. knowledged the possibility that the most troubling aspect of Goldenberg et al. [6] substantiated the TMT perspective being an animal might be mortality and therefore reminders on disgust by showing that experimentally inducing mortal- of human animal similarity might be problematic because ity salience led to a delayed increase in disgust sensitivity as they leave people prone to death anxiety. Disgust represents measured using the Haidt et al. Disgust Sensitivity Scale. It an aversion to stimuli that symbolically threaten the purity of is important to note that this study found an increase in dis- the soul by implying that humans are similar to other animals gust sensitivity only when participants had been reminded of and therefore no more enduring or valuable. They further their mortality and then distracted. This finding demon- suggested that such an analysis was consistent with the claim strated that disgust was a distal or symbolic defense rather put forth in Terror Management Theory [11] that people than a proximal or direct defense. Reminders of death were ameliorate anxiety about personal extinction by constructing not motivating immediate disgust as a means to avoid poten- symbolic forms of identity which are viewed as more endur- tially life threatening stimuli but rather were motivating de- ing and significant than the merely corporeal existence of layed disgust as a means to symbolically distinguish humans nonhuman animals. as more valuable, special and enduring
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