The neuropsychology of disgust

The neuropsychology of disgust.

Beginning with the landmark case of Phineas Gage (Harlow, 1868), studies of neurological patients with ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) damage have time and again demonstrated a critical role for this brain area in various aspects of emotion, social cognition and decision-making. The importance of vmPFC for social and affective function is further underscored by a host of clinical neuroim...

The neurology of disgust.

Emotions form part of the fabric of our minds, and the scientific attempts to map these dimensions onto the underlying neural substrates date back to the first half of the last century. It has long been suggested that emotional functions are associated with subcortical structures (e. was the first to postulate that emotional processing is based on an interconnected cortical-subcortical system, ...

Varieties of disgust faces and the structure of disgust.

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 to...

The Ethics of Disgust

I argue that the recent debate about the role disgust deserves in ethical thought has been impoverished by an inadequate understanding of the emotion itself. After considering Kass and Nussbaum’s respective positions in that debate, and the implausible views of the nature of disgust on which their arguments rest, I describe my own view, which makes sense of the wealth of recent, often puzzling,...

The science of neuropsychology