What is disgust?
Il disgust It is one of the basic emotions (Ekman, 1992), together with others such as fear, sadness, anger.
The emotion of the disgust It is characterized by a feeling of repulsion and aversion to something or someone. Like all basic emotions, the disgust has its own function and utility: the disgust It is useful to us because it reports the potential danger and harmfulness of some agents and situations. The disgust It therefore implies at the behavioral level the removal (refusal) of the person from what arouses it, be it an object, a situation, a person.
At the physiological level, the disgust Activate a visceral response such that the individual physically experiences nausea, as demonstrated by several studies that have exposed people to the vision of disgusting images (Shenhav and Mendes, 2014).
Think of a food that expired with an unpleasant taste: the disgust It is the emotional state that removes us and means that we refuse the intake of this food harmful to our body or contact with something that we consider harmful to our person; It is also the disgust which pushes us, for example, to maintain good hygiene of the hands, after having come into contact with potentially contaminating agents (Rozin et al., 2016).
Disgust and fear of contamination in obsessive compulsive disorder
In some forms of obsessive-compulsive disorder, the component of the disgustsuch that the person presents a hypersensitivity to the issues of potential contamination. In these cases, the disgust It becomes a hyper-focal emotion, that is, very present in the person’s mind and experience.
Dirt is considered intolerable (in an extreme and dichotomous logic all-o-nulla), the person feels the need for total control compared to stimuli in which the threat is overrated, and lives under the claim to have the certainty of not being dirty and contaminated, therefore “perfectly” clean. It is in this way that the fear of contamination It becomes a real obsession.
According to these modalities, the emotion of disgustsupported by irrational beliefs, loses its adaptive side and indeed becomes a dysfunctional emotion that activates and maintains real psychopathological symptoms.
Il fear of contamination It can be activated in relation to certain substances, in relation to animals, to certain situations considered by the dirty person and also with regard to people assessed as disgusting, depreciable and morally lower.
It is important to underline that the fear of contamination It is activated not only following a real contact that occurred, but also in case of doubt (for example, I am sure I have not come into contact with the hair of the colleague who approached?) or in case of imagined contact.
Extreme and irrational beliefs are therefore activated in the mind in relation to contagion, for example once you are in contact with something of disgusting And contagious, you will remain “contaminated”.
Therefore, avoidance is one of the dysfunctional strategies that the person activates, striving in every way to avoid contacts that it potentially considers contaminating. All this to feel safe, to ensure not to experience the unpleasant feeling of feeling dirty and contaminated.
The response of the person suffering from an obsessive compulsive disorder with fear of contamination It also implies compulsions to put shelter from possible contamination with certain stimuli; For example, repeated, long -lasting and tiring sanitification rituals can implement to go more and more towards the certainty of having eliminated dirt following a possible contact or doubt of contact. Even the only imagining or the only view of a stimulus considered disgusting and contaminating can activate the compulsive response.
Mental contamination
Mental contamination implies an internal feeling of “dirt”. There are different situations that can activate the feeling of mental contamination, for example events in which the person felt violated, degraded and humiliated, or situations in which the person was not a victim but acted these violations about others.
So the interpersonal moral disgusttowards the other and also towards themselves. Even the sudden intrusion into the minds of some mental thoughts and mentally reprovable thoughts (for example of a sexual or aggressive nature) precisely because they are considered unacceptable activate the feeling of moral contamination of a moral nature. The person therefore feels the pressure to make complexes of purification rituals, physical or even mental rituals (mental repetition of words, prayers, etc.), in order to neutralize unacceptable obsessive thoughts and the relative discomfort. However, compulsions and rituals actually represent factors to maintain symptoms.
Cognitive-behavioral psychotherapy represents a valid help for people who find themselves living with these tiring experiences, primarily understanding the nature and mechanisms of debut and maintenance of symptoms. Therapy intervenes through different strategies to improve the management of emotions and tolerance of uncertainty, the cognitive renovation of irrational thoughts, compulsive and avoidant dysfunctional behaviors, as well as repetitive negative thought processes.
