DISGUST SENSITIVITY AND GENDER DIFFERENCES: AN INITIAL TEST OF THE PARENTAL INVESTMENT HYPOTHESIS
Journal Title: Problems of Psychology in the 21st Century - Year 2013, Vol 7, Issue 12
Abstract
It is suggested that the emotion of disgust evolved as a disease protection mechanism in humans. The vast majority of the research revealed that females are consistently more disgust sensitive than males. Certain adaptationists have suggested that gender differences in disgust sensitivity reflect higher parental investment and offspring protection by females as compared with males. We experimentally tested the parental investment hypothesis by manipulating the visual and acoustic exposure of participants to cues associated with parental investment (a picture of an infant’s face and the sounds of an infant crying). The control group was exposed to cues that do not trigger parental investment (an adult man speaking a foreign language). It was found that participants in the experimental group did not score higher in the pathogen disgust domain and had similar expected reproductive goals than participants in the control group. Girls and sexually mature participants rated pictures with disease-relevant animals as more disgusting than boys and sexually immature participants. These results provide no support for the role of parental investment as an ultimate explanation for higher disgust sensitivity in females.
Authors and Affiliations
Pavol Prokop, Milada Jančovičová
Keywords
Related Articles
- EP ID EP32024
- DOI -
- Views 358
- Downloads 0
FACTORIAL STRUCTURE AND pSYCHOMETRIC pROpERTIES OF ATTITUDES TO ECONOMIC DEpENDENCE OR INDEpENDENCE IN A SAMpLE OF bULGARIAN CITIZENS
Rising interactions of asymmetrical exchange as a consequence of unequal access to economic resources create status differences between people. In that way some people are provided with authority benefts while the othe...
PSYCHOLOGICAL RECURRENCES AND INTERVENTION PROPOSAL FOR PATIENTS FOLLOWING BARIATRIC SURGERY
Obesity has been declared by the World Health Organization (WHO) as an epidemic, due to a growth trend in obesity rates over the past 60 years and it is estimated that by 2015 there will be approximately 2.3 billion ov...
THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN INFERENTIAL PROCESSING AND TEXT PROCESSING: A DEVELOPMENTAL STUDY
The research reported here was designed to investigate the critical role played by certain factors implicated in the mental representation of text, and to establish whether their role varies signifcantly as a function o...
THE EFFECTS OF PARASITES ON HUMAN BEHAVIOUR: AN EVOLUTIONARY PERSPECTIVE
Parasites and predators possess serious threats to humans throughout our evolutionary history. Although the impact of predators in modern world is lower than previously, parasites still influence morbidity and mortality...
THE JUDGMENTS CONTENT ABOUT THE OTHERS IS CONDITIONED BY THE SELF-STRUCTURE OF THE PERSON
The article presents a conceptual model explaining the genesis of person judgments about the others as mediated by motivation regulation. The model is drawn from knowledge theory which has been designed by Losskiy and Fr...