Disgust Essay

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Introduction
There are universal emotions which are experienced by each individual around the world. Example for those emotions can be listed as fear, anger, disgust, sadness and so on. People born with those emotions and those emotions evolved to serve as a mechanism which would help individuals to cope with certain obstacles that they face in the environment they live in. Each emotion serves a purpose in the survival of the individual. (Darwin 1872/1965; Ekman, 1992, 1999; Izard, 1991, 1992; Tomkins & McCarter, 1964). Even though those emotions are universal and known to be experienced by each individual, each person has different levels of sensitivity towards fear, disgust or anger triggering cues. Those differences are believed to be due to traits of the environment that each person lives in (Abe & Izard, 1999).
Disgust is one of the universal emotions that is mentioned above. Evolutionary purpose of the emotion disgust is contaminant-avoidance. Human body has parts that are sensitive to things that gives us cue about containment of pathogens or/and being potentially harmful (Kavaliers, Choleris, & Pfaff, 2005; Kiesecker, Skelly, Beard, & Preisser, 1999). Humans perceive visual, olfactory and tactile cues from around they live and make choices relevant to their observations. Color of a rotten fruit, smell of a animal carcass, or feeling of a sweaty palm is shaking your's are originating from this disgust mechanism that makes individual less vulnerable to diseases.
In presence of pathogen containing things around, disgust mechanism makes the body to give certain types of reactions like nausea, inappetence and so on, which would make the individual avoid the risk of contaminations. Here we a problem where an individual experie...

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...ntry (Fincher, Thornhill, 2012). When we apply the Error Management Theory here (Haselton & Buss, 2000), we can conclude those results like following, as living in a place where pathogen and disease prevalence is high, in order not to caught a disease of become contaminated, people become more restrictive and conservative towards people who they identify as different from them. Even though out group members can't be classified as pathogen carrying potential harm (like rotting food, animal carcass, body fluids), the interpersonal disgust gets involved in and people start to discriminate out group members and become conservative, score lower on openness personality trait (Druschel & Sherman, 1999 ; Duncan et al., 2009).
In this cross cultural study, we tried to investigate political ideology, pathogen avoidance, disgust sensitivity, and attitudes toward out groups.

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