A new study has found that people exposed to core disgusts (blood, guts, body products) showed higher levels of attention the more disgusting the content grew even though they had negative reactions to the content.
Bridget Rubenking, University of Central Florida, and Annie Lang, Indiana University, published their findings from an experiment with 120 participants.
Participants watched TV/film clips of three distinct types of disgust: socio-moral, body product and death/gore.
Rubenking and Lang measured participants' heart rate, facial expressions and skin moisture.
After viewing they tested participants' memory for scenes presented in the messages; examined differences in individuals' memory and physiological levels of activity from before the onset of disgust in each clip to time points immediately after; and then compared the data across disgust types.
The findings suggested that socio-moral disgust-eliciting content elicited a slower response, characterized by one of initial attention and increasing negativity and arousal, and was remembered better before, at and after the onset of disgust.
Both core disgusts saw more of an immediate negativity and defensive response.
Body product disgusts in particular showed an initial defensive response pattern: Instead of eliciting immediate attention, the onset of body product disgusts elicited sharp increases in negativity and arousal, and an acceleration of heart rate, indicating that the content was at first too disgusting to pay attention to.
Memory for content before the onset of disgust in the core disgust messages was at near-chance levels - indicating that the disgust onset served as a cognitive interrupt and made participants forget what they had seen before it.
Memory improved at and after disgust onset across all disgust types, and heart rate showed a deeper deceleration over time, showing more attention being paid to the content.
Together this data suggests that despite being fully aware of how disgusted they were, participants could not turn away from any of the disgusting content, and actually paid more attention the more disgusting the content got.
The study is published in the Journal of Communication.
