
Those especially sensitive to pathogen disgust might be motivated by a desire to avoid the possibility of an open wound on the victim of the aggression. For those especially sensitive to moral disgust, they would want to be less aggressive because they want to avoid hurting others.

This can be explained in terms of each of the types of disgust. Researchers have found that sensitivity to disgust is negatively correlated to aggression because feelings of disgust typically bring about a need to withdraw while aggression results in a need to approach. This behavioral immune system has been found to make sweeping generalizations because "it is more costly to perceive a sick person as healthy than to perceive a healthy person as sickly".

Because of this, disgust is believed to have evolved as a component of a behavioral immune system in which the body attempts to avoid disease-carrying pathogens in preference to fighting them after they have entered the body. The above-mentioned main disgust stimuli are similar to one another in the sense that they can all potentially transmit infections, and are the most common referenced elicitors of disgust cross-culturally.

It is believed that the emotion of disgust has evolved as a response to offensive foods that may cause harm to the organism.

ĭisgust is one of the basic emotions of Robert Plutchik's theory of emotions and has been studied extensively by Paul Rozin. Research continually has proven a relationship between disgust and anxiety disorders such as arachnophobia, blood-injection-injury type phobias, and contamination fear related obsessive–compulsive disorder (also known as OCD). Musically sensitive people may even be disgusted by the cacophony of inharmonious sounds. Disgust is experienced primarily in relation to the sense of taste (either perceived or imagined), and secondarily to anything which causes a similar feeling by sense of smell, touch, or vision. In The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, Charles Darwin wrote that disgust is a sensation that refers to something revolting. Disgust ( Middle French: desgouster, from Latin gustus, "taste") is an emotional response of rejection or revulsion to something potentially contagious or something considered offensive, distasteful, or unpleasant.
