ABSTRACT
The emotions, disgust, horror, awe, and fascination, all involve encounters with compelling aspects of life experience. Most frequently, they orient outwardly but all can, at times, turn their attention toward aspects of the self. Three key concepts help us examine these emotions: these are self, humanity, and category-breaching. Each feeling speaks to shifts in the configuration of self. Atypical human conditions often elicit one of the four feelings, for example, monstrous humans or blank-faced individuals can evoke horror. Exposures to moments that challenge common categories, such as the living and the dead, are intellectually and emotionally powerful and may engage one or more of the target emotions. These feelings may co-occur – as in exposure to carnage, which elicits both disgust and horror – or they may represent opposing vectors, for example, when disgust limits fascination over sexual deviance or horror responds to extremes of self-directed awe.
