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The status of disgust as a sociomoral emotion is debated. We conducted a stringent test of whether social stimuli (specifically, political outgroup members) can elicit physical disgust, as distinct from moral or metaphorical disgust. We employed stimuli (male faces) matched on baseline disgustingness, provided other ways for participants to express negativity toward outgroup members, and used concrete self-report measures of disgust, as well as a nonverbal measure (participants' facial expressions). Across three preregistered studies (total N = 915), we found that political outgroup members are judged to be "disgusting," although this effect is generally weaker for concrete self-report measures and absent for the nonverbal measure. This suggests that social stimuli are capable of eliciting genuine physical disgust, although it is not always outwardly expressed, and the strength of this result depends on the measures employed. We discuss implications of these results for research on sociomoral emotions and American politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What is the relationship between religious affiliation and conceptions of the moral domain? Putting aside the question of whether people from different religions agree about how to answer moral questions, here we investigate a more fundamental question: How much disagreement is there across religions about which issues count as moral in the first place? That is, do people from different religions conceptualize the scope of morality differently? Using a new methodology to map out how individuals conceive of the moral domain, we find dramatic differences among adherents of different religions. Mormon and Muslim participants moralized their religious norms, while Jewish participants did not. Hindu participants in our sample did not seem to make a moral/non-moral distinction of the same kind. These results suggest a profound relationship between religious affiliation and conceptions of the scope of the moral domain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Highlights: [•] Suicide is unlike many immoral acts, which often involve harm to others. [•] Subjects read and evaluated obituaries describing victims of suicide or homicide. [•] Purity concerns and feelings of disgust account for moral judgments of suicide. [•] Harm-based concerns do not account for moral judgments of suicide, unlike homicide. [•] Explicit justifications do not reflect the underlying source of moral judgments. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: The traditional cognitive developmental perspective on moral acquisition posits that children actively construct moral beliefs by assessing the negative impacts of antisocial behaviors. This account is not easily applied to actions that are considered immoral despite lacking consequences for others’ welfare. We studied the moralization of behaviors without tangible impacts, specifically examining the independent and joint roles of feelings and norms in children’s acquisition of purity-based morals. Seven-year-olds were shown pictures of anthropomorphic aliens engaged in unfamiliar activities and were asked to judge whether these actions were wrong or OK. Relative to a control condition matched for valence and informational complexity, children made elevated wrongness judgments when they were either disgusted or led to believe that the behaviors were unnatural. However, it was only in a condition that included both disgust induction and information about unnaturalness that children exhibited robust tendencies to judge the actions as wrong. This research therefore demonstrates that feelings and norms work in concert such that purity morals are most readily acquired when both factors are involved. The implications for accounts of moral development are discussed. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

What causes people to change their beliefs about right and wrong? Coherence-based interventions can change people's moral beliefs about abstract moral principles (Holyoak & Powell, 2016), but it is unclear whether these interventions would be similarly effective for everyday moral beliefs that can impact routine behavior. In the present research, we examined whether coherence-based "memes" highlighting the moral similarities of pigs and dogs can shift moral beliefs about consuming meat. Across three preregistered experiments (N = 2281), we found that self-reported beliefs about the permissibility of eating some animals can be subtly shifted by brief coherence-based interventions which highlight morally relevant capacities (e.g., intelligence, emotional capacities) of an animal that is frequently eaten in Western society (pig) and an animal that is typically considered forbidden to eat by Westerners (dog). We discuss the implications of these findings for psychological and ethical theory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many people judge suicide to be immoral. We have found evidence that these moral judgments are primarily predicted by people’s belief that suicide taints the soul and by independent concerns about purity. This finding is inconsistent with accounts that define morality as fundamentally based upon harm considerations. In this commentary, we respond to a critique of our finding, and we provide further support for our original conclusions. Even when applying new exclusion criteria to our data, an examination of effect sizes demonstrates that concerns about purity robustly and meaningfully explain variance in moral judgments of suicide. While harm concerns sometimes predict moral judgments of suicide alongside purity concerns, they reliably explain a much smaller proportion of the variance than do purity concerns. Therefore, data from six studies continue to suggest that the relevance of harm concerns for moral judgments of suicide is substantially overshadowed by the contribution of purity concerns. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Strohminger (2014) is revolted by McGinn’s (2011) book, The Meaning of Disgust. We argue that her reaction of repugnance highlights one of the greatest mysteries in the psychology of disgust: this emotion is at times elicited by abstract ideological concerns rather than physical threats of infection or contamination. Here we describe the theoretical challenge of accounting for nonpathogenic disgust elicitors, which include spiritual defilement, violations of the “natural order,” and, apparently, McGinn’s latest publication. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]