The Relationship Between Moral Disgust And Physical Disgust

Evolutionary psychology argues that the moral disgust originates from physical disgust. All human beings of modern times are born with a disgust evaluation system, which can be activated from toxic and unfairness information in a direct route and often coupled to a motivation to expel. While the research on the mechanisms that the disgust evaluation system is still at a start level, the previous research focus on the higher order cognition rather than lower order cognition.The attention is primarily discussed in this study. We choose emotional stroop methodology and dot-probe methodology to test evolutionary hypothesis of the extension of disgust. In the first research, we used Chinese words as the materials of emotion priming stimulus, and adopt emotional stroop methodology to test the relationship between the physical disgust and the moral disgust in attention. In the second research, we choose the mixed design and adopt emotion priming with dot-probe methodology to test the relation between physical disgust-related words and attentional bias in the condition of moral disgust priming. We get the result as below:1. People show a significant attentional bias towards physical disgust-related stimulus, which corresponds with the previous result.2. People show a significant attentional bias towards moral disgust-related stimulus.3. There is no significant difference between the reaction time of color-naming to the moral disgust moral disgust-related stimulus and the physical disgust-related stimulus. It indicates that there exists relationship between moral disgust and physical disgust in the course of attention.4. People show a psychological tendency to wash in moral disgust cognition of affective priming, which is reflected in the course of attention.