We all have them from time to time – strong, emotionally-colored urges to act in ways that make no rational sense and are counterproductive in our current modern society. Our forbears, and conservative Christians even today, ascribed this to “Original Sin” and prescribed prayer and penance as a countermeasure. Classical psychiatry presumes that the roots of such behavior lie in early childhood experience and suggests uncovering the experiences that planted seeds of present maladaptive habits as a cure.
In recent years anthropologists and evolutionary psychologists have been paying more attention to the possibility that many troublesome urges are the hard-wired product of evolution – that they have a basis in our human genes and are there because for most of the history of the species, they were adaptive. This makes intuitive sense to me, and is more in keeping with my own experience than the psychiatric model.
One current area of active research in evolutionary psychology deals with disgust and its role in disease avoidance. Disgust is distinct from fear and hatred. It produces nausea and a strong urge to avoid physical contact, not a fight or flight response. Smells are more powerful triggers of disgust than sight or sound, suggesting, among other things, that more primitive parts of the brain are involved and that disgust responses have very deep evolutionary roots.
There is much anecdotal evidence and some scientific data suggesting that disgust reactions are stronger among pregnant women than among the general population. It has been suggested that morning sickness, for example, once served an adaptive function by making pregnant women less likely to eat toxic or contaminated foods at a time when the developing fetus is most vulnerable to toxins or disease. Substances tend to be disgusting more or less in proportion to the likelihood they will spread human disease. Rotting meat and human or carnivore feces are disgusting; rotting vegetables and horse manure merely unpleasant. A person disfigured by the scars of trauma provokes a very different reaction from one with oozing sores.
When I was pregnant, I experienced a strong negative visceral reaction to severely handicapped children, which was something of an embarrassment since it ran counter to everything I had been taught about proper compassionate behavior. It required considerable exercise of will to keep from crossing the street to avoid coming in close proximity to a child with cerebral palsy. In retrospect I think it was that atavistic portion of my brain processing the handicap as something possibly contagious, and urging me to keep at a distance to protect my unborn child. In this instance, overriding the instinct was clearly the right thing to do. At other times, listening to one’s “gut” may not be such a bad idea. Pregnancy, for example, sharpened my normal aversion to certain artificial sweeteners that are now suspected of having undesirable effects on adult human metabolism at high levels and could have corresponding effects on a developing fetus.
Further Reading:
Natural News contains a compendium of information on links between artificial sweeteners and a variety of health problems including metabolic changes and premature birth.
Science Daily features an article on the role of disgust in evolution and its possible role in moral judgments.
Photo Credits:
Photo courtesy of Martha Sherwood. Public Domain.
There is currently a meme circulating on Facebook which purports to tell a person’s political affiliation based on their reactions to a set of questions which have to do with reactions to potentially disgusting situations, like stirring soup with a flyswatter. The test is based on some social science research suggesting that political conservatives tend to have lower disgust thresholds. Here is a link to a rather dogmatic misrepresentation of the research. https://braindecoder.com/post/politics-neuroscience-1282982492 When trying to follow the thread I reflected that suppression of the disgust reaction is learned behavior and that what we have learned in our artificial and overly clean environment might not serve us terribly well if we were thrown into an environment (for example in a natural disaster).where our gut instincts would serve us well.