COLUMBUS – It’s called “disgust sensitivity” and it is a measure of how intensely a person is repulsed by images, ideas or situations.
They could be considered merely unpleasant or terribly gross but our reaction to seeing — for example — someone put ketchup on vanilla ice cream and eating it is an evolutionary trait that helped humans avoid eating rotten food that would make them sick.
Psychology researchers at Ohio State found that, during the COVID-19 pandemic, concern about getting sick with a coronavirus infection was associated with an increase in disgust sensitivity.
“Disgust sensitivity was higher in studies we ran during the pandemic, but particularly higher for people who felt concerned they would actually contract COVID-19,” said Shelby Boggs, a doctoral student in psychology at OSU and author of the study. which appears in the February issue of the journal Personality and Individual Differences.
Boggs and the other researchers measured disgust sensitivity on a scale of 0 to 4, where 4 is “extremely disgusting” and found that pre-pandemic average disgust sensitivity among the participants in their study was 2.82, but increased to 3.26 during the pandemic.
Before the pandemic, the team collected data from about 2,300 participants, then conducted two more surveys in late spring 2020, after the coronavirus emerged nationally.
The first was an entirely new group of participants, but the second consisted of people who had participated in the pre-pandemic surveys, providing a look at how those participants’ reactions changed during the early months of the outbreak.