Reader Comments
Post a new comment on this article
Post Your Discussion Comment
Please follow our guidelines for comments and review our competing interests policy. Comments that do not conform to our guidelines will be promptly removed and the user account disabled. The following must be avoided:
- Remarks that could be interpreted as allegations of misconduct
- Unsupported assertions or statements
- Inflammatory or insulting language
Thank You!
Thank you for taking the time to flag this posting; we review flagged postings on a regular basis.
closeDisgust or negative evaluation in general?
Posted by PeterPrudon on 30 May 2013 at 07:52 GMT
I wonder whether the phenomenon of disgust has much to do with preference for symmetry in any substantive sense. First, seeing and evaluating disgust in someone else's face is a different phenomenon than feeling disgust yourself. The latter is typical only for OCD patients with contamination anxiety and washing compulsion, but many of them are not typically bothered by issues of order and symmetry. On the other hand, the OCD patients that are sensitive for order and symmetry need not typically be bothered by disgust of human or animal secretion substances. So seeing disgust in someone else's face may evoke merely an association with negative evaluation in general, and therefore be congruent with a-symmetry and disorder. The correlation between (sub-)clinical OCD tendencies and interference by this kind of incongruity may be preserved to those who are bothered by issues of order and precision, and may be lacking in pure instances of contamination anxiety, who are "specialists in disgust".