Emotion Regulation as the Foundation of Political Attitudes: Does Reappraisal Decrease Support for Conservative Policies?

Cognitive scientists, behavior geneticists, and political scientists have identified several ways in which emotions influence political attitudes, and psychologists have shown that emotion regulation can have an important causal effect on physiology, cognition, and subjective experience. However, no work to date explores the possibility that emotion regulation may shape political ideology and attitudes toward policies. Here, we conduct four studies that investigate the role of a particular emotion regulation strategy – reappraisal in particular. Two observational studies show that individual differences in emotion regulation styles predict variation in political orientations and support for conservative policies. In the third study, we experimentally induce disgust as the target emotion to be regulated and show that use of reappraisal reduces the experience of disgust, thereby decreasing moral concerns associated with conservatism. In the final experimental study, we show that use of reappraisal successfully attenuates the relationship between trait-level disgust sensitivity and support for conservative policies. Our findings provide the first evidence of a critical link between emotion regulation and political attitudes.     

The Divergent Effects of Fear and Disgust on Inhibitory Control: An ERP Study

Negative emotional stimuli have been shown to attract attention and impair executive control. However, two different types of unpleasant stimuli, fearful and disgusting, are often inappropriately treated as a single category in the literature on inhibitory control. Therefore, the present study aimed to investigate the divergent effects of fearful and disgusting distracters on inhibitory control (both conscious and unconscious inhibition). Specifically, participants were engaged in a masked Go/No-Go task superimposed on fearful, disgusting, or neutral emotional contexts, while event-related potentials were measured concurrently. The results showed that for both conscious and unconscious conditions, disgusting stimuli elicited a larger P2 than fearful ones, and the difference waves of P3 amplitude under disgusting contexts were smaller than that under fearful contexts. These results suggest that disgusting distracters consume more attentional resources and therefore impair subsequent inhibitory control to a greater extent. This study is the first to provide electrophysiological evidence that fear and disgust differently affect inhibitory control. These results expand our understanding of the relationship between emotions and inhibitory control.     

Disgust sensitivity, obesity stigma, and gender: contamination psychology predicts weight bias for women, not men

Recent research has established a link between disgust sensitivity and stigmatizing reactions to various groups, including obese individuals. However, previous research has overlooked disgust's multiple evolved functions. Here, we investigated whether the link between disgust sensitivity and obesity stigma is specific to pathogen disgust, or whether sexual disgust and moral disgust--two separate functional domains--also relate to negative attitudes toward obese individuals. Additionally, we investigated whether sex differences exist in the manner disgust sensitivity predicts obesity stigma, whether the sexes differ across the subtypes of obesity bias independent of disgust sensitivity, and last, the association between participants' BMI and different subtypes of obesity stigma. In study 1 (N = 92), we established that obesity elicits pathogen, sexual, and moral disgust. In study 2, we investigated the relationship between these types of disgust sensitivity and obesity stigma. Participants (N = 387) reported their level of disgust toward various pathogen, sexual, and moral acts and their attitudes toward obese individuals. For women, but not men, increased pathogen disgust sensitivity predicted more negative attitudes toward obese individuals. Men reported more negative general attitudes toward obese individuals whereas women reported greater fear of becoming obese. The sexes also differed in how their own BMI related to the subtypes of obesity stigma. These findings indicate that pathogen disgust sensitivity plays a role in obesity stigma, specifically for women. Defining the scope of disgust's activation in response to obesity and its relationship with other variables can help identify possible mechanisms for understanding and ultimately alleviating prejudice and discrimination.     

The behavioral immune system and social conservatism: a meta-analysis

The behavioral immune system (BIS) is a cluster of psychological mechanisms (e.g., disgust) that have evolved to promote disease-avoidance (Schaller M. (2006). Parasites, behavioral defenses, and the social psychological mechanisms through which cultures are evoked. Psychological Inquiry, 17, 96–101). Recent evidence suggests that the BIS may promote avoidance of outgroup members, an historical source of contamination, by evoking social conservatism (Terrizzi JA Jr, Shook NJ, & Ventis WL. (2010). Disgust: A predictor of social conservatism and prejudicial attitudes toward homosexuals. Personality and Individual Differences, 49, 587–592; Terrizzi J, Shook N, Ventis L. (2012). Religious conservatism: An evolutionarily evoked disease-avoidance strategy. Religion, Brain & Behavior, 2, 105–120.). That is, the BIS mechanisms may encourage the endorsement of socially conservative beliefs, which promote social exclusivity, tradition, and negativity toward outgroups. The current study provides a systematic review and meta-analysis of 24 studies to evaluate the hypothesis that the BIS is predictive of social conservatism. The results indicate that behavioral immune strength, as indicated by fear of contamination and disgust sensitivity, is positively related to social conservatism (i.e., right-wing authoritarianism, social dominance orientation, religious fundamentalism, ethnocentrism, collectivism, and political conservatism). These findings provide initial evidence that socially conservative values may function as evolutionarily evoked disease-avoidance strategies.     

Feelings of Disgust and Disgust-Induced Avoidance Weaken following Induced Sexual Arousal in Women

Background

Sex and disgust are basic, evolutionary relevant functions that are often construed as paradoxical. In general the stimuli involved in sexual encounters are, at least out of context strongly perceived to hold high disgust qualities. Saliva, sweat, semen and body odours are among the strongest disgust elicitors. This results in the intriguing question of how people succeed in having pleasurable sex at all. One possible explanation could be that sexual engagement temporarily reduces the disgust eliciting properties of particular stimuli or that sexual engagement might weaken the hesitation to actually approach these stimuli.

Methodology

Participants were healthy women (n = 90) randomly allocated to one of three groups: the sexual arousal, the non-sexual positive arousal, or the neutral control group. Film clips were used to elicit the relevant mood state. Participants engaged in 16 behavioural tasks, involving sex related (e.g., lubricate the vibrator) and non-sex related (e.g., take a sip of juice with a large insect in the cup) stimuli, to measure the impact of sexual arousal on feelings of disgust and actual avoidance behaviour.

Principal Findings

The sexual arousal group rated the sex related stimuli as less disgusting compared to the other groups. A similar tendency was evident for the non-sex disgusting stimuli. For both the sex and non-sex related behavioural tasks the sexual arousal group showed less avoidance behaviour (i.e., they conducted the highest percentage of tasks compared to the other groups).

Significance

This study has investigated how sexual arousal interplays with disgust and disgust eliciting properties in women, and has demonstrated that this relationship goes beyond subjective report by affecting the actual approach to disgusting stimuli. Hence, this could explain how we still manage to engage in pleasurable sexual activity. Moreover, these findings suggest that low sexual arousal might be a key feature in the maintenance of particular sexual dysfunctions.     

Disgust versus Lust: Exploring the Interactions of Disgust and Fear with Sexual Arousal in Women

Sexual arousal is a motivational state that moves humans toward situations that inherently pose a risk of disease transmission. Disgust is an emotion that adaptively moves humans away from such situations. Incongruent is the fact that sexual activity is elementary to human fitness yet involves strong disgust elicitors. Using an experimental paradigm, we investigated how these two states interact. Women (final N=76) were assigned to one of four conditions: rate disgust stimuli then watch a pornographic clip; watch a pornographic clip then rate disgust stimuli; rate fear stimuli then watch a pornographic clip; or watch a pornographic clip then rate fear stimuli. Women’s genital sexual arousal was measured with vaginal photoplethysmography and their disgust and fear reactions were measured via self-report. We did not find that baseline disgust propensity predicted sexual arousal in women who were exposed to neutral stimuli before erotic content. In the Erotic-before-Disgust condition we did not find that sexual arousal straightforwardly predicted decreased image disgust ratings. However, we did find some evidence that sexual arousal increased self-reported disgust in women with high trait disgust and sexual arousal decreased self-reported disgust in women with low trait disgust. Women who were exposed to disgusting images before erotic content showed significantly less sexual arousal than women in the control condition or women exposed to fear-inducing images before erotic content. In the Disgust-before-Erotic condition the degree of self-reported disgust was negatively correlated with genital sexual arousal. Hence, in the conflict between the ultimate goals of reproduction and disease avoidance, cues of the presence of pathogens significantly reduce the motivation to engage in mating behaviors that, by their nature, entail a risk of pathogen transmission.     

Physiological and behavioral responses to strangers compared to friends as a source of disgust

Known as the source effect, feelings of disgust have been found to differ depending on the source of the disgusting material, with that emanating from oneself and familiar others eliciting less disgust than that of strangers. We tested the source effect on self-report of disgust feelings (Study 1), physiological response in heart rate (Study 2), and behavioral response in terms of approach–avoidance movement (Study 3). The results showed significantly higher levels of disgust feelings, more reduced heart rates, and faster avoidance behavior when processing disgusting material associated with strangers compared to that of familiar persons. Together these findings support the evolutionary view that disgust, as part of the human behavioral immune system to drive avoidance from disease-carrying agents, will likely be activated more intensely and quickly in response to unfamiliar as compared to familiar conspecifics who carry common germs more defendable by our shared physical immunity.     

Evidence that disgust evolved to protect from risk of disease

Disgust is a powerful human emotion that has been little studied until recently. Current theories do not coherently explain the purpose of disgust, nor why a wide range of stimuli can provoke a similar emotional response. Over 40 000 individuals completed a web-based survey using photo stimuli. Images of objects holding a potential disease threat were reported as significantly more disgusting than similar images with little or no disease relevance. This pattern of response was found across all regions of the world. Females reported higher disgust sensitivity than males; there was a constant decline in disgust sensitivity over the life course; and the bodily fluids of strangers were found more disgusting than those of close relatives. These data provide evidence that the human disgust emotion may be an evolved response to objects in the environment that represent threats of infectious disease.     

Attitudes toward Animals among German Children and Adolescents

ABSTRACT

This is the first study about attitudes toward animals among German children and adolescents. A sample of 543 pupils (261 boys, 282 girls) aged 11 to 17 (mean age = 13.37 ± 2.01 years) completed a questionnaire based on different established scales, for example, the Animal Attitude Scale (AAS) and the Intermediate Attitude Scale (IAS). Several aspects of attitudes toward animals and various dimensions of human–animal relationships were measured, including gender, age, grade, pet ownership, animal-related activities, meat consumption, and fear of and disgust toward animals. Gender and age were important factors in determining attitudes toward animals: pro-animal attitudes decreased with age and girls showed more positive attitudes compared with boys. Pet ownership and animal-related activities were associated with more positive attitudes toward animals, whilst meat consumption was related to lower pro-animal attitudes. There were no correlations between fear and general attitudes toward animals. The correlations between disgust and attitudes toward animals were weak. We found significant correlations among the different scales and subscales in animal attitudes.     

Political orientations are correlated with brain structure in young adults

Substantial differences exist in the cognitive styles of liberals and conservatives on psychological measures. Variability in political attitudes reflects genetic influences and their interaction with environmental factors. Recent work has shown a correlation between liberalism and conflict-related activity measured by event-related potentials originating in the anterior cingulate cortex. Here we show that this functional correlate of political attitudes has a counterpart in brain structure. In a large sample of young adults, we related self-reported political attitudes to gray matter volume using structural MRI. We found that greater liberalism was associated with increased gray matter volume in the anterior cingulate cortex, whereas greater conservatism was associated with increased volume of the right amygdala. These results were replicated in an independent sample of additional participants. Our findings extend previous observations that political attitudes reflect differences in self-regulatory conflict monitoring and recognition of emotional faces by showing that such attitudes are reflected in human brain structure. Although our data do not determine whether these regions play a causal role in the formation of political attitudes, they converge with previous work to suggest a possible link between brain structure and psychological mechanisms that mediate political attitudes.     

Disgust sensitivity and the neurophysiology of left-right political orientations

Disgust has been described as the most primitive and central of emotions. Thus, it is not surprising that it shapes behaviors in a variety of organisms and in a variety of contexts--including homo sapien politics. People who believe they would be bothered by a range of hypothetical disgusting situations display an increased likelihood of displaying right-of-center rather than left-of-center political orientations. Given its primal nature and essential value in avoiding pathogens disgust likely has an effect even without registering in conscious beliefs. In this article, we demonstrate that individuals with marked involuntary physiological responses to disgusting images, such as of a man eating a large mouthful of writhing worms, are more likely to self-identify as conservative and, especially, to oppose gay marriage than are individuals with more muted physiological responses to the same images. This relationship holds even when controlling for the degree to which respondents believe themselves to be disgust sensitive and suggests that people's physiological predispositions help to shape their political orientations.     

Smoking at the workplace: effects of genetic and environmental causal accounts on attitudes toward smoking employees and restrictive policies

People hold diverse beliefs regarding the etiologies of individual and group differences in behaviors which, in turn, might affect their attitudes and behaviors. It is important to establish how perceived etiologies of smoking might affect the effectiveness of policy initiatives and prevention efforts. The present study assessed whether exposure to genetic vs. environmental accounts for smoking affects attitudes toward (a) workplace-related smoking policies and (b) smokers at the workplace. Results indicate that exposure to a genetic explanation led to stronger objections to a smoking restrictive policy compared with a non-genetic explanation. Additionally, participants in the genetic condition were more accepting of a smoker in the workplace than those in the environmental condition. Evidently, beliefs about the etiology of smoking influence a range of attitudes related to smokers and smoking-related policies.     

Disgust sensitivity relates to affective responses to – but not ability to detect – olfactory cues to pathogens

Hundreds of studies have assessed variation in the degree to which people experience disgust toward substances associated with pathogens, but little is known about the mechanistic sources of this variation. The current investigation uses olfactory perception and threshold methods to test whether it is apparent at the cue-detection level, at the cue-interpretation level, or both. It further tests whether relations between disgust sensitivity and olfactory perception are specific to odors associated with pathogens. Two studies (N's = 119 and 160) of individuals sampled from a Dutch university each revealed that pathogen disgust sensitivity relates to valence perceptions of odors found in pathogen sources, but not to valence perceptions of odors not associated with pathogens, nor to intensity perceptions of odors of either type. Study 2, which also assessed olfactory thresholds via a three-alternative forced-choice staircase method, did not reveal a relation between pathogen disgust sensitivity and the ability to detect an odor associated with pathogens, nor an odor not associated with pathogens. In total, results are consistent with the idea that pathogen disgust sensitivity relates to how olfactory pathogen cues are interpreted after detection, but not necessarily to the ability to detect such cues.     

Sex differences in neural activation to facial expressions denoting contempt and disgust

The facial expression of contempt has been regarded to communicate feelings of moral superiority. Contempt is an emotion that is closely related to disgust, but in contrast to disgust, contempt is inherently interpersonal and hierarchical. The aim of this study was twofold. First, to investigate the hypothesis of preferential amygdala responses to contempt expressions versus disgust. Second, to investigate whether, at a neural level, men would respond stronger to biological signals of interpersonal superiority (e.g., contempt) than women. We performed an experiment using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), in which participants watched facial expressions of contempt and disgust in addition to neutral expressions. The faces were presented as distractors in an oddball task in which participants had to react to one target face. Facial expressions of contempt and disgust activated a network of brain regions, including prefrontal areas (superior, middle and medial prefrontal gyrus), anterior cingulate, insula, amygdala, parietal cortex, fusiform gyrus, occipital cortex, putamen and thalamus. Contemptuous faces did not elicit stronger amygdala activation than did disgusted expressions. To limit the number of statistical comparisons, we confined our analyses of sex differences to the frontal and temporal lobes. Men displayed stronger brain activation than women to facial expressions of contempt in the medial frontal gyrus, inferior frontal gyrus, and superior temporal gyrus. Conversely, women showed stronger neural responses than men to facial expressions of disgust. In addition, the effect of stimulus sex differed for men versus women. Specifically, women showed stronger responses to male contemptuous faces (as compared to female expressions), in the insula and middle frontal gyrus. Contempt has been conceptualized as signaling perceived moral violations of social hierarchy, whereas disgust would signal violations of physical purity. Thus, our results suggest a neural basis for sex differences in moral sensitivity regarding hierarchy on the one hand and physical purity on the other.     

A fruity note: crossmodal associations between odors and musical notes

Odors are notoriously difficult to describe, but they seem prone to a variety of crossmodal associations. In the present study, we generalize the previously-shown association between odors (from perfumery) and pitch (Belkin et al. 1997) to odors related to food and drink (in this case those associated with wine). We also demonstrate that, to a lesser extent (25% of the odor tested), participants preferentially match specific odors to certain types of instruments. The ratings of the odors along a number of dimensions are used in principal components analysis (PCA) to explore the psychological dimensions underlying the odor-pitch associations. The results demonstrate that both pleasantness and complexity, but not intensity, appear to play a role when choosing a pitch to match an odor. Our results suggest that these features of odor stimuli constitute psychological dimensions that can be consistently matched to auditory features.     

Sex difference in the relationship between salivary testosterone and inter-temporal choice

Humans often prefer a small immediate reward to large reward in the future. This myopic tendency in inter-temporal choice is termed delay discounting, and has been the focus of intensive research in the past decades. Recent studies indicate that the neural regions underlying delay discounting are influenced by the gonadal steroids. However, the specific relationship between the testosterone levels and delay discounting is unclear at this point, especially in females.The present study investigated the relationship between salivary testosterone concentrations and discounting rates in delay- and probability-discounting tasks with healthy males and females. The results revealed a positive correlation between testosterone concentrations and delay-discounting rates in females and a negative correlation in males. Testosterone concentrations were unrelated to probability-discounting rates. Although causal effects of testosterone cannot be certain in this correlational study, if testosterone directly influenced this behavior, observed sex differences in delay discounting may be evidence of a curvilinear effect of testosterone. Alternatively, the findings may reflect inverse pattern of responsiveness to testosterone between male and female neural systems, or basic sex-difference in the neural mechanism underlying delay-discounting independent of testosterone itself.     

The Odor Context Facilitates the Perception of Low-Intensity Facial Expressions of Emotion

It has been established that the recognition of facial expressions integrates contextual information. In this study, we aimed to clarify the influence of contextual odors. The participants were asked to match a target face varying in expression intensity with non-ambiguous expressive faces. Intensity variations in the target faces were designed by morphing expressive faces with neutral faces. In addition, the influence of verbal information was assessed by providing half the participants with the emotion names. Odor cues were manipulated by placing participants in a pleasant (strawberry), aversive (butyric acid), or no-odor control context. The results showed two main effects of the odor context. First, the minimum amount of visual information required to perceive an expression was lowered when the odor context was emotionally congruent: happiness was correctly perceived at lower intensities in the faces displayed in the pleasant odor context, and the same phenomenon occurred for disgust and anger in the aversive odor context. Second, the odor context influenced the false perception of expressions that were not used in target faces, with distinct patterns according to the presence of emotion names. When emotion names were provided, the aversive odor context decreased intrusions for disgust ambiguous faces but increased them for anger. When the emotion names were not provided, this effect did not occur and the pleasant odor context elicited an overall increase in intrusions for negative expressions. We conclude that olfaction plays a role in the way facial expressions are perceived in interaction with other contextual influences such as verbal information.     

Political Attitudes Develop Independently of Personality Traits

The primary assumption within the recent personality and political orientations literature is that personality traits cause people to develop political attitudes. In contrast, research relying on traditional psychological and developmental theories suggests the relationship between most personality dimensions and political orientations are either not significant or weak. Research from behavioral genetics suggests the covariance between personality and political preferences is not causal, but due to a common, latent genetic factor that mutually influences both. The contradictory assumptions and findings from these research streams have yet to be resolved. This is in part due to the reliance on cross-sectional data and the lack of longitudinal genetically informative data. Here, using two independent longitudinal genetically informative samples, we examine the joint development of personality traits and attitude dimensions to explore the underlying causal mechanisms that drive the relationship between these features and provide a first step in resolving the causal question. We find change in personality over a ten-year period does not predict change in political attitudes, which does not support a causal relationship between personality traits and political attitudes as is frequently assumed. Rather, political attitudes are often more stable than the key personality traits assumed to be predicting them. Finally, the results from our genetic models find that no additional variance is accounted for by the causal pathway from personality traits to political attitudes. Our findings remain consistent with the original construction of the five-factor model of personality and developmental theories on attitude formation, but challenge recent work in this area.     

Gendered fitness interests: A method partitioning the effects of family composition on socio-political attitudes and behaviors

Whereas most people are biologically either male or female, their genetic interests are almost never aligned with just their own sex. Drawing on the evolutionary theory of inclusive fitness gained through relatives, we partition the effects of kin on fitness into those that derive from female versus male relatives. We argue that the balance of these female- and male-derived effects, which we call ‘Gendered Fitness Interests’ (GFI), might influence human behavior, especially the adoption of socio-political attitudes that have a gendered dimension. Our proposal builds on observations that an individual's socio-political views covary with the sex of their children or the numbers of relatives of each sex. Further, it is consistent with the relatively small average differences between women's and men's socio-political positions. We outline a method for partitioning GFI, and use simulation models to explore some of its properties. We then show that (1) the GFI component of women's and men's socio-political attitudes will converge, on average, with age. (2) The contributions of both descendent and non-descendent kin lead to considerable variation in GFI. (3) When men have longer average reproductive lifespans than women, GFI can show small male-biases. (4) Paternity uncertainty reduces the variation in GFI between individuals, and (5) Large family sizes are associated with more variation among individuals in GFI. Our proposal provides a framework for the study of the effects of kin on traits and attitudes with a gendered dimension. In this respect, it may prove generally useful in resolving the complex origins of gendered behavior.     

Positive implicit attitudes toward odor words

Associations between certain odors and for instance health effects may lead to positive or negative attitudes toward these odors. However, in experiments we conducted using the Implicit Association Test (IAT), we encountered attitudes even to odor "words." The IAT is based on the principle that reaction times measuring the association between words from a target dimension (in this case, odor vs. a neutral reference category) and an attribute dimension (i.e., positive or negative words) reflect the attitude to the target, where attitude-congruent associations between target and attribute are reflected by shorter reaction times. In a first experiment, we found distinctly positive attitudes to the concept odor in a student sample, which was replicated in a second experiment. In the main experiment, subjects in the aromatherapy group, who prefer using scented consumer products for relaxation purposes, showed a significantly more positive attitude toward odor words in the IAT than a control group, who did not have such a preference. The fact that results from the implicit test were not always associated with explicitly stated attitudes toward the odor words attests to the fact that the IAT measures the attitude of interest in a different way. As such, the IAT has added value in circumstances where explicit tests can be biased.