Disgust has been characterized as a basic emotion, with unique physiological, behavioral and cognitive features. Although emotions have been a main subject of psychopathology over the last decades, disgust has recently been labelled as a “forgotten emotion” in psychiatry. In their original work, Haidt et al. (1994) outlined 8 domains of disgust elicitors: food, animals, body products, body envelope violation, death, sex, and hygiene, and a domain of sympathetic magic. While there is some variability in people’s disgust sensitivity, this emotion has a fairly recognizable set of elicitors within a given culture. The aim of this work was to examine the kinds of domains in which Spanish experience disgust.

We asked participants (students of psychology at the UNED) to describe:

Descriptions of disgusting stimuli, objects and behaviors were conceptually classified in the following 11 domains: body products, animals, foods, envelope violations, hygiene/dirt, putrefaction, socio-moral, sex, death, disease, and marginalization/poverty. The largest of these domains were body products, animals and foods, which accounted for 64% of all descriptions. The more distressing reactions were related to body products, foods and hygiene.

We replicated the domains previously found by Haidt et al. (1994), except the area of sympathetic magic. Our data also provide support for new kinds of disgust elicitors, named socio-moral, death, and marginalization/poverty.