| The body participates in conceptual thought, according to research in the burgeoning paradigm of embodied cognition. Even abstract concepts involve sensory imagery and the reenactment of bodily experiences in which they are rooted. A separate line of research has demonstrated that emotions like social disgust involve bodily experiences that resemble our conceptual understanding of the situations that trigger them. Social disgust really is disgust. Situations involving nothing physically disgusting can nevertheless evoke nausea and oral revulsion. While such results are predicted by embodiment, embodied cognition has not been established as a causal explanation. The purpose of this research was to explore whether the same learning process that grounds a concept in a bodily experience could be used to create social disgust for a new situation if it were characterized by that same concept. Three necessary factors for embodied concept learning were proposed: (1) an encounter with something physically disgusting, (2) a conceptual interpretation of the disgust, and (3) a recurrence of the conceptual interpretation in a novel social scenario. These factors were presented in two experiments. In both experiments, an encounter with a bad smell was accompanied by one of three concepts explaining its reason for being, and judgments of moral wrongness or unlikability were solicited for scenarios involving the same concepts. Because feelings of physical disgust make social judgments more severe, according to previous research, the judgments served as a probe for social disgust. For the less offensive scenarios, judgments were more harsh when the concept in the scenario had first explained the bad smell, suggesting that embodied concept learning was a pathway to social disgust. Individual disgust sensitivity, the perceived repulsiveness of the odor, and the number of encounters with the scenario strongly moderated this effect. |
