Disgust is an emotion of intense dislike towards supposedly harmful substances and objects such as certain foods, urine, excrement, rotten organic materials or their odors. Unlike other minor forms of rejection, disgust, when extreme, is expressed through violent bodily reactions such as nausea, vomiting, sweating, low blood pressure, and even fainting. Disgust originates in the brain amygdala, integrated into the limbic system, where other emotions are also processed. There are things that cause disgust in almost all parts of the world, such as corpses, open wounds, waste – feces, urine, pus -, the smell of rotten food and certain animals such as worms, cockroaches, rats, larvae and caterpillars . However, some of them are not perceived as disgusting in some cultures. Also, according to experts, in past times in Europe, when hygiene was scarce, people felt less disgusted than today.
Wrinkled nose, closed eyes, frowning, raised upper lip, tongue sticking out … This is the expression on our face when faced with something that disgusts us. Such a face coincides with the definition of disgust according to Paul Rozin, an American psychologist who is an expert in the relationship between humans and food: “revulsion at the prospect of oral incorporation of a harmful substance.”
Babies make this face when they are given something bitter – like coffee or pure cocoa – a taste that causes us innate aversion because it is linked to toxic alkaloids that could poison us. We are also born with an instinctive rejection of overly intense hot spices , such as chili, a vegetable fruit that contains capsaicin. This is a natural substance intended to deter hungry mammals. So there are foods that are disgusting to us from birth for survival reasons.
However, adults drink copious amounts of coffee and flavor their food with chili, and many enjoy having their mouths burned with a potent spice. Why? By repeated exposure to these flavors and by what Rozin calls benign masochism : we learn to enjoy the sensation they give us.
