ABSTRACT
It often seems to come as surprising news that disgust, which reacts to foul, loathsome and spoiled things outside and inside ourselves, also moonlights as an angel of morality, helping us identify wrong actions. Indeed, the emotion of disgust in moral context has received much attention in recent psychological research. Many of these studies have tested only disgust or individual differences in disgust proneness as strengthening agents of moral condemnation (e.g., Wheatley & Haidt, 2005; Jones & Fitness, 2008; Schnall, Haidt, Clore, & Jordan, 2008). More recent research and criticism has sought to distinguish disgust from other emotions with common appraisal and core features and frequent co-activation in social situations, most prominently anger (e.g., Horberg, Oveis, Keltner, & Cohen, 2009; Olatunji et al., 2012; Russell & Giner-Sorolla, 2013). Yet if disgust is studied as a construct separate from anger and other high-arousal emotions, the question of what triggers it specifi cally in moral judgments of other people’s actions remains unclear. Specifi cally, some reviewers have argued that disgust is elicited by a wide range of moral violations (e.g., Chapman & Anderson, 2013), while others argue for a more specifi c remit (e.g., Russell & Giner-Sorolla, 2013).
