Two Forms of Disgust May Affect Treatment of Phobias

FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. - A University of Arkansas student has teased out the complexities of disgust, and his work may change the way clinical psychologists treat patients with phobias. His research has earned him the Distinguished Student Research Award from the American Psychological Association.

Graduate student Bunmi Olatunji was honored at the Division 12 Awards Ceremony during the annual American Psychological Association meeting in Hawaii on July 30. The award is bestowed by the Education and Training Committee of the Society of Clinical Psychology.

Olatunji has been looking systematically at the role of disgust and other complex emotions in anxiety disorders since he started studying under his mentor, psychology professor Jeffrey M. Lohr, four years ago. He now has 13 papers either accepted for publication or in press and is co-editing special issues on disgust in two scientific journals.

Olatunji's most recent contribution to the field is a theoretical review paper being published at the end of the year in the Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology. The paper integrates social and clinical research on disgust to identify future areas of research on the psychopathology of disgust. He worked on the paper with Craig Sawchuk, an assistant professor in the department of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at the University of Washington. Sawchuk received his doctorate from UA in 2000.

Olatunji is also the lead author on a recent study to be published in Behaviour Research and Therapy, showing that disgust is a more complex phenomenon than previously believed. He is joined by Lohr and Assistant Professor of Psychology Nathan Williams as authors. The paper studies the structure of disgust and examines whether it is a one-dimensional or multidimensional construct.

"The one-dimension theory would suggest that all disgust stimuli are the same or connected in some fashion," Olatunji said. "However, a multidimensional approach would suggest that certain categories of disgust elicitors (i.e., injections and blood draws) are qualitatively different from other categories of disgust elicitors (i.e., small animals and rotting foods). We tested the theories against each other, and the one-dimensional theory didn't fit the data well."

The two-dimensional model for disgust was better supported and divided the emotion into two basic categories: core disgust and animal reminder disgust. Core disgust is based on contamination concerns and includes disgust triggered by stimuli that may be offensive, such as rotting foods, waste products and small animals. It's a basic, cross-cultural reaction that may be evolutionary. Core disgust may be the basis for obsessive-compulsive behavior triggered by improbable contamination fears.

Animal reminder disgust includes aversion towards stimuli that remind us of our animal origins. This would include such things as death, skin or body violations (injections and blood draws; mutilation), hygiene concerns and sexual acts deemed inappropriate.

Animal reminder disgust is a relatively new idea, according to Olatunji. Prior to the two-dimensional theory, all factors for disgust were lumped into one category.

One goal for the study was to determine if one type of disgust was more closely linked to contamination fears. The team found core disgust more highly correlated to contamination fears than animal reminder disgust.

The findings are significant in how they can be applied in a clinical setting, the researchers say. Among the most common phobia therapies is a technique called exposure treatment, in which patients are exposed to the subject of their phobia in order to overcome it. The results of Olatunji's research indicate that this treatment may need to be modified to accommodate both types of disgust.

"If disgust is the hand-maiden of anxiety, it may impede exposure treatment from having its desired effect," Olatunji explained. "It could change how we treat people. If there's a different type of disgust that bothers them, it changes the types of things we would expose them to, if that's the preferred treatment."