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Disgust Trumps Lust: Women’s Disgust and Attraction Towards Men Is Unaffected by Sexual Arousal

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Abstract

Mating is a double-edged sword. It can have great adaptive benefits, but also high costs, depending on the mate. Disgust is an avoidance reaction that serves the function of discouraging costly mating decisions, for example if the risk of pathogen transmission is high. It should, however, be temporarily inhibited in order to enable potentially adaptive mating. We therefore tested the hypothesis that sexual arousal inhibits disgust if a partner is attractive, but not if he is unattractive or shows signs of disease. In an online experiment, women rated their disgust towards anticipated behaviors with men depicted on photographs. Participants did so in a sexually aroused state and in a control state. The faces varied in attractiveness and the presence of disease cues (blemishes). We found that disease cues and attractiveness, but not sexual arousal, influenced disgust. The results suggest that women feel disgust at sexual contact with unattractive or diseased men independently of their sexual arousal.

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Notes

  1. van Overveld and Borg (2015) did not find this effect.

  2. We used five-point and seven-point Likert scales with at least the endpoints labeled throughout the study, as Weijters, Cabooter, and Schillewart (2010) recommend.

  3. Participants received an individual ID code in part one, but some did not report it in part two.

  4. The assumption of homogeneity of variance was met despite the difference cell sizes.

  5. Some interaction effects were significant, because one of the cell differences was significant and the other was not. However, these differences never reflected trends in line with the literature. Furthermore, for interaction effects, they were partly very small groups, hence low power and hence a higher type II error rate.

  6. This variable was only available from participants who completed the neutral condition (n = 44).

  7. As a reminder, the attractiveness level refers to the attractiveness manipulation, hence to the attractive and unattractive faces we chose based on pilot testing. Attractiveness ratings refer to how attractive participants of this study rated the faces.

  8. We would like to thank two anonymous reviewers for pointing out some of these limitations.

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Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Andrea Schlump for her helpful comments on the study design and Aaron Kreidel for the editing of the stimuli. This research did not receive any specific grant from funding agencies in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Psychology, University of Portsmouth, King Henry Building, King Henry I Street, Portsmouth, PO1 2DY, UK

    Florian Zsok, Diana S. Fleischman & Edward Morrison

  2. Department of Psychology, University of Zurich, Binzmühlestrasse 14, 8050, Zürich, Switzerland

    Florian Zsok

  3. Department of Clinical Psychology and Experimental Psychopathology, University of Groningen, Grote Kruisstraat 2/1, 9712 TS, Groningen, The Netherlands

    Charmaine Borg

Authors
  1. Florian Zsok
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  2. Diana S. Fleischman
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  3. Charmaine Borg
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  4. Edward Morrison
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Correspondence to Florian Zsok.

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Zsok, F., Fleischman, D.S., Borg, C. et al. Disgust Trumps Lust: Women’s Disgust and Attraction Towards Men Is Unaffected by Sexual Arousal. Evolutionary Psychological Science 3, 353–363 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40806-017-0106-8

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s40806-017-0106-8

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