Women’s Disgust Adaptations

Pornography's Ubiquitous External Ejaculation: Predictors of Perceptions

One of the most contentious topics in the sexual arena is that of pornography. While some researchers focus on the costs and benefits of consumption, others focus on questions surrounding the objectification or degradation of women, with relatively little focus on the men involved, and the appeal of visual sexual stimuli more generally, including what that may tell us about the sexual interests of the consumers. In this study, we focus on what factors influence men's and women's perceptions of sexually explicit images, in particular the ubiquitous external ejaculation. Sex differences in perceptions of the images are examined as well as the influence of the emotional affect of the recipient of the ejaculation, the sexual orientation of the participant (are they looking at an image of their preferred sex or not), and a number of individual difference factors, including religiosity, Dark Triad personality traits, mate value, short-term mating strategy, and disgust sensitivity. Overall, the largest influences on perceptions were the direct effects of target emotional affect and sex, sex of viewer, sexual orientation of viewer, short-term mating orientation, and level of sexual disgust. In addition, substantial variation in perceptions was explained by the interaction between sex, sexual orientation, and target sex. The importance of positive affect in the images as well as the lack of association with psychopathy again suggests that the appeal (or at least the ubiquity of the images in pornographic material) is not rooted in degradation, but in some other aspect of short-term sexual psychology.

Perceptions of Sexual Images: Factors Influencing Responses to the Ubiquitous External Ejaculation

The debate over pornography has drawn attention to sex differences not only in the frequency of pornography consumption but also in the different ways males and females may perceive sexually explicit images and respond to them. Some of these differences may be due to sex differences in a variety of factors including sexual strategies and disgust, in particular, disgust related to pathogen avoidance. There is a large literature that focuses on how pathogen avoidance has shaped human behavior from political ideology to in-group/outgroup behavior to sexual risk taking/avoidance. This study examined sex differences in perceptions and how they are influenced by the emotional context of the image as well as individual difference factors, including disgust sensitivity, mate value, sociosexuality, and sexual orientation. Participants viewed a series of sexually explicit images of external ejaculations and rated them in terms of being positive, neutral, or negative. The factors accounting for the greatest variance in perceptions were target affect and sex, sexual orientation, and respondent sex, followed by pathogen and sexual disgust, self-perceived mate value, and sociosexual attitudes and desire.

Global sex differences in hygiene norms and their relation to sex equality

Strict norms about hygiene may sometimes have health benefits but may also be a burden. Based on research in the United States, it has been suggested that women traditionally shoulder responsibility for hygiene standards and therefore tend to have stricter views on hygiene. However, there is little systematic research on sex differences in hygiene norms at the global scale. We set up two hypotheses: (1) Stricter hygiene norms among women than among men is a global phenomenon. (2) The size of this sex difference varies across nations with the level of sex equality. We examine these hypotheses using data from a recent international survey (N = 17,632). Participants in 56 countries were asked for their views of where it is not appropriate for people to spit and in which situations people should wash their hands. As a measure of sex equality, we use an existing country-level measure of attitudes to equality between the sexes, available for 49 nations in the study. Stricter hygiene norms among women than among men are observed almost everywhere, but there are a few exceptions (most notably Nigeria and Saudi Arabia). The size of the sex difference in hygiene norms varies strongly with the level of sex equality, but in a non-linear way. The sex difference is most pronounced in moderately egalitarian countries with the highest recorded difference being in Chile. In more egalitarian parts of the world, more sex equality is associated with a smaller sex difference in hygiene norms. In the less egalitarian parts of the world, the opposite relation holds. We offer an interpretation in terms of what different levels of sex equality mean for the content of sex roles.

COVID-19 Pandemic on Fire: Evolved Propensities for Nocturnal Activities as a Liability Against Epidemiological Control

Humans have been using fire for hundreds of millennia, creating an ancestral expansion toward the nocturnal niche. The new adaptive challenges faced at night were recurrent enough to amplify existing psychological variation in our species. Night-time is dangerous and mysterious, so it selects for individuals with higher tendencies for paranoia, risk-taking, and sociability (because of security in numbers). During night-time, individuals are generally tired and show decreased self-control and increased impulsive behaviors. The lower visibility during night-time favors the partial concealment of identity and opens more opportunities for disinhibition of self-interested behaviors. Indeed, individuals with an evening-oriented chronotype are more paranoid, risk-taking, extraverted, impulsive, promiscuous, and have higher antisocial personality traits. However, under some circumstances, such as respiratory pandemics, the psychobehavioral traits favored by the nocturnal niche might be counter-productive, increasing contagion rates of a disease that can evade the behavioral immune system because its disease cues are often nonexistent or mild. The eveningness epidemiological liability hypothesis presented here suggests that during the COVID-19 pandemic, the evening-oriented psychobehavioral profile can have collectively harmful consequences: there is a clash of core tendencies between the nocturnal chronotype and the recent viral transmission-mitigating safety guidelines and rules. The pandemic safety protocols disrupt much normal social activity, particularly at night when making new social contacts is desired. The SARS-CoV-2 virus is contagious even in presymptomatic and asymptomatic individuals, which enables it to mostly evade our evolved contagious disease avoidance mechanisms. A growing body of research has indirectly shown that individual traits interfering with social distancing and anti-contagion measures are related to those of the nocturnal chronotype. Indeed, some of the social contexts that have been identified as superspreading events occur at night, such as in restaurants, bars, and nightclubs. Furthermore, nocturnal environmental conditions favor the survival of the SARS-CoV-2 virus much longer than daytime conditions. We compare the eveningness epidemiological liability hypothesis with other factors related to non-compliance with pandemic safety protocols, namely sex, age, and life history. Although there is not yet a direct link between the nocturnal chronotype and non-compliance with pandemic safety protocols, security measures and future empirical research should take this crucial evolutionary mismatch and adaptive metaproblem into account, and focus on how to avoid nocturnal individuals becoming superspreaders, offering secure alternatives for nocturnal social activities.

Subjective Experience of Disgust

Abstract. Background: Individual differences in the experience of disgust are known to influence the development and maintenance of several psychopathologies. Aims: This study examined the psychometric properties of the Portuguese version of the Disgust Propensity and Sensitivity Scale – Revised (DPSS-R). Method: The factor validity, the reliability of the Portuguese version of DPSS-R, the convergent validity, and the relationship with other scales were assessed in 229 participants. Results: The modified two-factor model, disgust propensity and sensitivity, was confirmed with good fit indexes and with acceptable convergent and discriminant validity. Overall, the internal consistency and the composite reliability of the DPSS-R were appropriate. The DPSS-R also revealed significant associations with the Disgust Scale, Maudsley Obsessive-Compulsive Inventory, Spider Phobia Questionnaire – Revised, and State-Trait Anxiety Inventory. Specifically, the disgust propensity factor was found to be a significant predictor of fear of spiders and trait anxiety, whereas both DPSS-R factors predicted obsessive-compulsive symptoms. Finally, women reported higher levels of disgust propensity and sensitivity than men. Conclusion: The Portuguese version of the DPSS-R proved to be a valid and reliable measure of disgust propensity and sensitivity and, therefore, with potential relevance for application in both research and clinical practice.

Slimy worms or sticky kids How caregiving tasks and gender identity attenuate disgust response

Disgust is derived from evolutionary processes to avoid pathogen contamination. Theories of gender differences in pathogen disgust utilize both evolutionary psychological and sociocultural perspectives. Drawing on research that suggests that masculine and feminine gender identities are somewhat orthogonal, we examine how gender identity intersects with pathogen disgust. In addition, building on evolutionary psychological and sociocultural accounts of how caregiving and parental investment affect pathogen disgust, we present a new measure of caregiving disgust and compare its properties across gender, parental status, and political ideology with those of a conventional pathogen disgust measure. This registered report finds that how masculinity and femininity affect disgust varies by gender, disgust domain, and their intersection; that parental status effects vary by disgust domain but not gender; that reframing disgust in terms of caregiving eliminates the gender gap in disgust; and that the caregiving frame unexpectedly strengthens the relationship between disgust and political ideology.

Interactions between inflammation and female sexual desire and arousal function

PURPOSE OF REVIEW

To describe the current state of research on interactions between inflammation and female sexual function.

RECENT FINDINGS

Inflammation may interfere with female sexual desire and arousal via direct (neural) and indirect (endocrine, vascular, social/behavioral) pathways. There are significant sex differences in the effect of inflammation on sexual function, arising from different evolutionary selection pressures on regulation of reproduction. A variety of inflammation-related conditions are associated with risk of female sexual dysfunction, including cardiovascular disease, metabolic syndrome, and chronic pain.

SUMMARY

Clinical implications include the need for routine assessment for sexual dysfunction in patients with inflammation-related conditions, the potential for anti-inflammatory diets to improve sexual desire and arousal function, and consideration of chronic inflammation as moderator of sexual effects of hormonal treatments. Although the evidence points to a role for inflammation in the development and maintenance of female sexual dysfunction, the precise nature of these associations remains unclear.

Consumption, contact and copulation: how pathogens have shaped human psychological adaptations

Disgust is an emotion intimately linked to pathogen avoidance. Building on prior work, we suggest disgust is an output of programmes that evolved to address three separate adaptive problems: what to eat, what to touch and with whom to have sex. We briefly discuss the architecture of these programmes, specifying their perceptual inputs and the contextual factors that enable them to generate adaptive and flexible behaviour. We propose that our sense of disgust is the result of these programmes and occurs when information-processing circuitries assess low expected values of consumption, low expected values of contact or low expected sexual values. This conception of disgust differs from prior models in that it dissects pathogen-related selection pressures into adaptive problems related to consumption and contact rather than assuming just one pathogen disgust system, and it excludes moral disgust from the domain of disgust proper. Instead, we illustrate how low expected values of consumption and contact as well as low expected sexual values can be used by our moral psychology to provide multiple causal links between disgust and morality.This article is part of the Theo Murphy meeting issue 'Evolution of pathogen and parasite avoidance behaviours'.

Sensitivity to Deviance and to Dissimilarity: Basic Cognitive Processes Under Activation of the Behavioral Immune System

Throughout evolutionary history, pathogens have imposed strong selection pressures on humans. To minimize humans' exposure to pathogens, a behavioral immune system that promotes the detection and avoidance of disease-connoting cues has evolved. Although most pathogens cannot be discerned by our sensory organs, they produce discernable changes in their environment. As a result, a common denominator of many disease-connoting cues is morphological deviance-figurative disparity from what is normal, visual dissimilarity to the prototype stored in memory. Drawing on an evolutionary rationale, we examine the hypothesis that activation of the behavioral immune system renders people more sensitive to morphological deviance and more prone to perceive dissimilarities between stimuli. In Study 1 ( N = 343), participants who scored higher on disgust sensitivity demonstrated greater differentiation between normal and disfigured faces, reflecting greater sensitivity to morphological deviance in the bodily domain. In Study 2 ( N = 109), participants who were primed with pathogen threat demonstrated greater differentiation between perfect and imperfect geometrical shapes, reflecting greater sensitivity to morphological deviance even in stimuli that have nothing to do with health or disease. In Study 3 ( N = 621), participants who scored higher on disgust sensitivity perceived pairs of neutral pictures as less similar (i.e., more dissimilar) to each other. Literature on the relations to social deviance and implications for social perception and for social behavior is discussed.

Sex Differences in Disgust: Why Are Women More Easily Disgusted Than Men?

Women have consistently higher levels of disgust than men. This sex difference is substantial in magnitude, highly replicable, emerges with diverse assessment methods, and affects a wide array of outcomes—including job selection, mate choice, food aversions, and psychological disorders. Despite the importance of this far-reaching sex difference, sound theoretical explanations have lagged behind the empirical discoveries. In this article, we focus on the evolutionary-functional level of analysis, outlining hypotheses capable of explaining why women have higher levels of disgust than men. We present four hypotheses for sexual disgust and six for pathogen disgust, along with testable predictions. Discussion focuses on additional new hypotheses and on future research capable of adjudicating among these competing, but not mutually exclusive, hypotheses.

Is Disgust Proneness Associated With Anxiety and Related Disorders? A Qualitative Review and Meta-Analysis of Group Comparison and Correlational Studies

Research suggests that disgust may be linked to the etiology of some anxiety-related disorders. The present investigation reviews this literature and employs separate meta-analyses of clinical group comparison and correlational studies to examine the association between disgust proneness and anxiety-related disorder symptoms. Meta-analysis of 43 group comparison studies revealed those high in anxiety disorder symptoms reported significantly more disgust proneness than those low in anxiety symptoms. Although this effect was not moderated by clinical versus analogue studies or type of disorder, larger group differences were observed for those high in anxiety symptoms associated with contagion concerns compared to those high in anxiety symptoms not associated with contagion concerns. Similarly, meta-analysis of correlational data across 83 samples revealed moderate associations between disgust proneness and anxiety-related disorder symptoms. Moderator analysis revealed that the association between disgust proneness and anxiety-related disorder symptoms was especially robust for anxiety symptoms associated with contagion concerns. After controlling for measures of negative affect, disgust proneness continued to be moderately correlated with anxiety-related disorder symptoms. However, negative affect was no longer significantly associated with symptoms of anxiety-related disorders when controlling for disgust proneness. The implications of these findings are discussed in the context of a novel transdiagnostic model.

Human Emotions: An Evolutionary Psychological Perspective

Evolutionary approaches to the emotions have traditionally focused on a subset of emotions that are shared with other species, characterized by distinct signals, and designed to solve a few key adaptive problems. By contrast, an evolutionary psychological approach (a) broadens the range of adaptive problems emotions have evolved to solve, (b) includes emotions that lack distinctive signals and are unique to humans, and (c) synthesizes an evolutionary approach with an information-processing perspective. On this view, emotions are superordinate mechanisms that evolved to coordinate the activity of other programs in the solution of adaptive problems. We illustrate the heuristic value of this approach by furnishing novel hypotheses for disgust and sexual arousal and highlighting unexplored areas of research.