Darwin discusses why different muscles are brought into action under different emotions and how particular animals have adapted for association with man.

“A sentimental layman would feel, and ought to feel, horrified, on being admitted into [an expert art] critic's mind, to see how cold, how thin, how void of human significance, are the motives for favour or disfavour that there prevail.” Thus writes William James. The art-world is dominated by critics who sneer and sentimentality, resist evocation, and issue stale, dispassionate appraisals. Memorized standards are coolly deployed to scan works for the features that are currently in fashion, before an icy verdict (...) is delivered. Untutored art enthusiasts make aesthetic judgments in an entirely differently way. For them, appraisal is read off “the sounding board of the body.” They use their emotions. Thus, according to James, there are two ways to assess art: cold and hot. So who is right, the rhapsodical museum-goer or the effete professional critic? As a first pass, I side with the rhapsodies. I think dispassionate appraisal is parasitic on passionate appraisal. Cool reason can never be sufficient on its own to assess artistic merit. This is a corollary of “aesthetic sentimentalism”—a view was championed by Hume and other British moralists. Of course, aesthetic sentimentalism does not entail that critics are wrong when they depart from the bubbling masses. It entails merely that good critics must be slaves to their own passions. Hacks may deliver aesthetic judgments dispassionately, but more sensitive critics have been known to muster an occasional gasp or thrill. Perhaps the refined emotions of professional critics have more validity than the crude gushings of James ’s “sentimental layman.” True beauty may be restricted to those works that elicit goosebumps in skilled viewers. Hume flirts with this idea. He thinks John Milton is objectively better than John Ogilby. Why? Because John Dryden said so, and he should know. John D. can arbitrate between the merits of John M. (shrink)

There have been few tests of whether exposure to naturalistic or experimental disease-threat inductions alter disgust sensitivity, although it has been hypothesized that this should occur as part of disgust’s disease avoidance function. In the current study, we asked Macquarie university students to complete measures of disgust sensitivity, perceived vulnerability to disease, hand hygiene behavior and impulsivity, during Australia’s Covid-19 pandemic self-quarantine period, in March/April 2020. These data were then compared to earlier Macquarie university, and other local, and overseas student (...) cohorts, to determine if disgust sensitivity and the other measures, were different in the lockdown sample. The most consistent finding in the lockdown sample was of higher core disgust sensitivity, with some evidence of greater germ aversion on the PVD, and an increase in hand and food-related hygiene, but with little change in impulsivity. The consistency with which greater core disgust sensitivity was observed, suggests exposure to a highly naturalistic disease threat is a plausible cause. Greater disgust sensitivity may have several functional benefits and may arise implicitly from the threat posed by the Covid-19 pandemic. (shrink)

Comparing food taboos across 78 cultures, this paper demonstrates that meat, though a prized food, is also the principal target of proscriptions. Reviewing existing explanations of taboos, we find that both functionalist and symbolic approaches fail to account for meat's cross-cultural centrality and do not reflect experience-near aspects of food taboos, principal among which is disgust. Adopting an evolutionary approach to the mind, this paper presents an alternative to existing explanations of food taboos. Consistent with the attendant risk of pathogen (...) transmission, meat has special salience as a stimulus for humans, as animal products are stronger elicitors of disgust and aversion than plant products. We identify three psychosocial processes, socially-mediated ingestive conditioning, egocentric empathy, and normative moralization, each of which likely plays a role in transforming individual disgust responses and conditioned food aversions into institutionalized food taboos. (shrink)

Much research has explored behaviours that are linked with disgust sensitivity. Few studies, however, have been devoted to understanding how fixed or variable disgust sensitivity is. We therefore aimed to examine whether disgust sensitivity can change with the environment by repeatedly testing students whose environment was not changing as well as student cadets undergoing intensive training at an army camp. We found that an increase in the perceived harshness of the environment was associated with a decrease in pathogen disgust sensitivity. (...) Our results support the idea that disgust sensitivity is malleable depending on the environment. More specifically, we propose that in a harsh environment, where survival may be more difficult, pathogen disgust sensitivity may decrease to allow the consumption of available resources. (shrink)