Motivation and emotion/Book/2024/Disgust and hygiene

Disgust and hygiene:
How does disgust influence hygiene behaviours and what are the psychological mechanisms involved?

U3214564

Multimedia presentation (3 min)

Overview

Figure1: The immediate feeling of disgust compels you to avoid touching anything and wash your hands thoroughly.

Scenario Imagine you are in a public restroom and notice an unclean sink. The immediate feeling of disgust compels you to avoid touching anything and wash your hands thoroughly. The chapter explores how disgust influences hygiene behaviours and examines the psychological mechanisms involved.

• Disgust Causes Immediate Actions: In order to prevent contamination, disgust causes quick actions to be taken, such as handwashing. (e.g., see Figure 1)
• Influence: Disgust has an influence on daily hygiene decisions, which are essential for illness prevention.
• Underlying Psychological Mechanisms: Understanding how behaviour is motivated by disgust provides an explanation for the differences in hygiene practices.

Focus questions: *How does disgust function as an adaptive emotional response? *What are the psychological mechanisms linking disgust to hygiene behaviours? *How do individual differences in disgust sensitivity impact hygiene practices?

Understanding disgust

Disgust developed as a defence mechanism to keep people safe from toxins and illness. Beyond just physical responses, social and moral disgust also affects our interactions and behaviour. It functions as a defence against illness. People differ in how sensitive they are to disgust, and this influences how they choose to avoid perceived contaminants and how they maintain their daily hygiene.

Origin of disgust

• Talk about how disgust evolved to shield people from dangerous substances and possible infections.

Disgust as defence mechanisms against disease

• Describe how avoidance practices, which lower the risk of contamination and illness, are prompted by disgust.

Disgust and hygiene behaviours

Disgust is an adaptive mechanism used to stave off illness. It motivates hygienic practices like hand washing, which are essential for averting disease.Disgust can be divided into three domains: moral, sexual, and pathogen. Pathogen disgust is strongly associated with preventive measures taken to prevent illness.

How disgust drives hygiene practices

• Examine how disgust motivates acts such as cleaning and handwashing in order to prevent infection.

The role of disgust in everyday hygiene choices

• Talk about how disgust affects the choices we make on a daily basis, like cleaning frequently or avoiding unclean places.

Psychological mechanisms of disgust

Key to disease avoidance is disgust, which can trigger preventative hygiene behaviours as well as maladaptive reactions like obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) in certain situations.

Disgust sensitivity: individual differences

• Give a brief explanation of how different people's experiences with disgust influence their hygiene practices.

Cognitive and Behavioural Links Between Disgust and Hygiene

• Describe how learnt connections and avoidance cause particular hygienic habits to arise from the feeling of disgust.

Public health implications

Behaviours related to hygiene could have evolved through evolution or heredity. Disgust can be effectively used by public health campaigns to promote improved cleanliness habits, for example, by using images that draw attention to the spread of germs.

Leveraging Disgust in Public Health Campaigns

• Talk about how highlighting contamination concerns in campaigns might help people adopt hygienic practices like handwashing.

The Balance Between Healthy and Excessive Disgust

• Talk about how healthy hygiene can be promoted without going too far in terms of disgust, by striking a balance between healthy and excessive contempt.

Headings

• Aim for three to six main headings in between the Overview and Conclusion
• Sub-headings can also be used, but
  • avoid having sections with only one sub-heading
  • provide an introductory paragraph before breaking into sub-sections

Key points

• Key Points:
• Disgust evolved as a protective mechanism to avoid pathogens.
• The emotional response of disgust is deeply linked to hygiene behaviours.
• Individual differences in disgust sensitivity lead to varied hygiene practices.

Figures

Figure 2. Example of an image with a descriptive caption.

• Use figures to illustrate concepts, add interest, and to serve as examples
• Figures can show photos, diagrams, graphs, video, audio, etcetera
• Embed figures throughout the chapter, including the Overview section
• Figures should be captioned (using Figure #. and a caption). Use captions to explain the relevance of the image to the text/
• Wikimedia Commons provides a library of embeddable images
• Images can also be uploaded to Wikimedia Commons if they are openly licensed
• Refer to each figure at least once in the main text (e.g., see Figure 2)

Learning features

Interactive learning features help to bring online book chapters to life and can be embedded throughout the chapter.

Scenarios

• Scenarios or case studies describe applied/real-world examples of concepts in action
• Case studies can be real or fictional
• A case study could be split into multiple boxes throughout a chapter (e.g., to illustrate different theories or stages)
• It is often helpful to present case studies using feature boxes.

Feature boxes

• Important content can be highlighted in a feature box. But don't overuse feature boxes, otherwise they lose their effect.
• Consider using feature boxes for:
  • Scenarios, case studies, or examples
  • Focus questions
  • Tips
  • Quiz questions
  • Take-home messages

Links

• When key words are introduced, use interwiki links to:
  • Wikipedia (e.g., Sigmund Freud wrote about (e.g., dreams) or
  • Related book chapters (e.g., writer's block)

Tables

• Use to organise and summarise information
• As with figures, tables should be captioned
• Refer to each table at least once in the main text (e.g., see Table 1)
• Example 3 x 3 tables which could be adapted

Table 1. Descriptive Caption Which Explains The Table and its Relevant to the Text - Johari Window Model

	Known to self	Not known to self
Known to others	Open area	Blind spot
Not known to others	Hidden area	Unknown

Quizzes

• Using one or two review questions per major section is usually better than a long quiz at the end
• Quiz conceptual understanding, rather than trivia
• Don't make quizzes too hard
• Different types of quiz questions are possible; see Quiz

Example simple quiz questions. Choose your answers and click "Submit":

1 Why do you think we feel disgusted when seeing something dirty or gross?

	To make us laugh
	To help us avoid getting sick
	To make life more interesting
	To test our bravery

2 Question: What happens when someone has a strong sense of disgust?

	They avoid things that seem dirty or dangerous
	They become curious about gross things
	They ignore hygiene completely
	They want to touch everything

3 Why might people from different countries react differently to the same disgusting thing?

	Because everyone has the same experiences
	Because of different cultural backgrounds and traditions
	Because they all watch the same movies
	Because they all live in the same climate

Conclusion

• The Conclusion is arguably the most important section
• Suggested word count: 150 to 330 words
• It should be possible for someone to only read the Overview and the Conclusion and still get a pretty good idea of the problem and what is known based on psychological science

Suggestions for this section: What is the answer to the sub-title question based on psychological theory and research? What are the answers to the focus questions? What are the practical, take-home messages? (Even for the topic development, have a go at the likely take-home message)

See also

Disgust (Wikipedia)

Hygiene (Wikipedia)

Obsessive-compulsive disorder (Wikipedia)

Provide internal (wiki) links to the most relevant Wikiversity pages (esp. related motivation and emotion book chapters) and Wikipedia articles. Use these formats:

• Light triad (Book chapter, 2021)
• Collaborative authoring using wiki (Wikiversity)
• Self determination theory (Wikipedia)

Suggestions for this section: Present in alphabetical order Use sentence casing Include the source in parentheses

References

• Curtis, V., & Biran, A. (2001). Dirt, Disgust, and Disease: Is Hygiene in Our Genes? Perspectives in Biology and Medicine, 44(1), 17–31. https://doi.org/10.1353/pbm.2001.0001
• Curtis, V., de Barra, M., & Aunger, R. (2011). Disgust as an adaptive system for disease avoidance behaviour. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B. Biological Sciences, 366(1568), 1320–1320. https://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2011.0002
• Davey, G. C. L. (2011). Disgust: the disease-avoidance emotion and its dysfunctions. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B. Biological Sciences, 366(1583), 3453–3465. https://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2011.0039
• Oaten, M., Stevenson, R. J., & Case, T. I. (2009). Disgust as a Disease-Avoidance Mechanism. Psychological Bulletin, 135(2), 303–321. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0014823
• Rozin, P., Haidt, J., & McCauley, C. R. (1999). Disgust: The body and soul emotion. Handbook of cognition and emotion, 429, 445.
• Tybur, J. M., Lieberman, D., Kurzban, R., & DeScioli, P. (2013). Disgust: Evolved Function and Structure. Psychological Review, 120(1), 65–84. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0030778

External links

Provide external links to highly relevant resources such as presentations, news articles, and professional sites. Use sentence casing. For example:

• Six top tips for writing a great essay (University of Melbourne)
• The importance of structure (skillsyouneed.com)

Suggestions for this section: Only select links to major external resources about the topic Present in alphabetical order Include the source in parentheses after the link