News release

From: The Royal Society

• Smell ya later! – Memories of disgusting experiences are more strongly associated with smells, tastes and touches than scary or morally repulsive episodes. When asked to recall their most repulsive experiences, participants reported disgust memories featured proximal senses (smell, taste or touch), more than morally repulsive or fear memories, which were linked more with “distal” senses (sight and sound). This supports the disease-avoidance hypothesis that disgust acts as a way to avoid pathogens entering the body. Royal Society Open Science.

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Royal Society Open Science
https://royalsocietypublishing.org/journal/rsos

Smell ya later! - Differential Involvement of the Senses in Disgust Memories.
Do disgusting memories feature smells, tastes or touches more prominently than sights or sounds? To answer this question, we asked participants to recall their most ever and most-recent disgusting, yucky/gross, morally repulsive and scary experiences. After recalling these experiences, participants were asked to rate how much each sense contributed to their affect (i.e., disgust, yucky/gross feeling, moral-repulsion and fear, respectively). Our results show that disgusting and yucky/gross experiences are disease-related, multisensory, and - unlike fear or morally repulsive memories - feature the proximal senses (smells, tastes or touches) to a comparable if not greater degree than the distal senses (sights or sounds).