Heterogeneity Of Moral Disgust And Physiological Disgust:Evidence Of Differences From The Emotion And ERP Components

Physical disgust refers to repulsive experience to dirtiness while moral disgust refers to repulsive experience to immoral people and behavior. And according to the disgust extension theory and pre-adaptation theory of evolutionary perspective, moral disgust is developed based on physical disgust and their emotional experience and behavioral expression shares some similarity. In addition, some researches have demonstrated that moral disgust and physical disgust are belong to different type, there are some distinction between appraising mechanism, electrophysiology and cultural difference, etc. In present study, we aim to use behavioral and ERP techniques to investigate the differences in emotional and ERP components stimulated by those two disgust types.In Experiment1, we used pictures as material and adopt self-report measure, asking participant to give rating to how they feel in disgust, anger, fear, sadness and happiness after showing disgust pictures in three different time points, in order to explore the emotional, components differences in moral disgust and physical disgust. And in Experiment2, given that moral disgust and physical disgust possess different appraising mechanism, we use two-character words as material and ERP technique, employing lexical decision task paradigm to discuss the heterogeneity between P200and Late Positive Component (LPC)in different time windows stimulated by those two disgust types.The results are as follows:(1) Moral disgust and physical disgust contains different emotional components. Except disgust feeling, the emotional components stimulated by moral disgust also include anger and sadness, and for physical disgust, fear is mainly included.(2) In P200, the amplitude stimulated by physical disgust words is significantly larger than those stimulated by moral disgust words which suggests that in the early stage of cognitive processing, physical disgust occupies more cognitive resources than moral disgust.(3) In Late Positive Component (LPC), the amplitudes stimulated by moral disgust words and physical disgust words are marginally significant different in right prefrontal. And the activation of right prefrontal is related to avoidant motivation, compared to moral disgust, the physical disgust evoke more avoidant motivation suggesting that physical disgust could include emotional components of high-avoidant motivation like disgust, fear, etc, which demonstrate Experiment1's conclusion in some extend.