Varieties of disgust faces and the structure of disgust.

Paul N. Rozin, Laura Lowery, Rhonda Ebert·1994·Journal of Personality and Social Psychology

Abstract

In 3 facial expression identification studies, college students matched a variety of disgust faces to verbally described eliciting situations. The faces depicted specific muscle action movements in accordance with P. Ekman and W. V. Friesen's (1978) Facial Action Coding System. The nose wrinkle is associated with either irritating or offensive smells and, to some extent, bad tastes. Gape and tongue extrusion are associated primarily with what we call core or food-offense disgust and also oral irritation. The broader range of disgust elicitors, including stimuli that remind humans of their animal origins (e.g., body boundary violations, inappropriate sex, poor hygiene, and death), a variety of aversive interpersonal contacts, and certain moral offenses are associated primarily with the raised upper lip. The results support a theory of disgust that posits its origin as a response to bad tastes and maps its evolution onto a moral emotion.

Cites (2)

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  2. Voluntary Facial Action Generates Emotion‐Specific Autonomic Nervous System Activity
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Cited by (31)

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  2. Evolutionary origins of stigmatization: The functions of social exclusion.
    Kurzban, Robert, Leary, Mark R. · 2001 · Psychological Bulletin
  3. Functional neuroanatomy of emotions: A meta-analysis
    MURPHY, F. C., NIMMO-SMITH, I., LAWRENCE, A. D. · 2003 · Cognitive, Affective, & Behavioral Neuroscience
  4. Disgust as a disease-avoidance mechanism.
    Oaten, Megan, Stevenson, Richard J., Case, Trevor I. · 2009 · Psychological Bulletin
  5. Neuropsychology of fear and loathing
    Calder, Andrew J., Lawrence, Andrew D., Young, Andrew W. · 2001 · Nature reviews. Neuroscience

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Cite CoChat for the checks on this page, and the paper for its own findings.

This page
CoChat. (2026). Citation check: Varieties of disgust faces and the structure of disgust. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1037//0022-3514.66.5.870
The paper
Rozin, P. N., Lowery, L., & Ebert, R. (1994). Varieties of disgust faces and the structure of disgust. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. https://doi.org/10.1037//0022-3514.66.5.870

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Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.