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Disgust is a basic emotion characterized by adaptive responses to mobilize organisms against unpleasant or harmful stimuli (Ekman, 1992). There is a wide range of disgust eliciting stimuli, including primarily food, animals, body and also moral violations (Rozin & Fallon, 1987; Rozin, Haidt, & McCauley, 1999). Although disgust has a substantial survival value; excessive, distressing and stable disgust related responses have been associated with various psychological problems such as anxiety disorders (Olatunji, Cisler, McKay, & Phillips, 2010), disordered eating patterns (Davey, Buckland, Tantow, & Dallos, 1998; Troop, Treasure, & Serpell, 2002).
Disgust directed toward one's own behavior, body, physical appearance or overall self is conceptualized as self-disgust (Overton, Markland, Taggart, Bagshaw, & Simpson, 2008). However, unlike basic disgust experience, self-disgust reactions tend to be persistent and excessive acting like a personality trait and related to maladaptive self-appraisals (Powell, Simpson, & Overton, 2015). Moreover, the development of self-disgust is more complex involving sociocultural expectations, negative past experiences, also childhood trauma and abuse (Powell et al., 2015a, 2015b). These features of self-directed disgust are similar to those of self-conscious emotions such as shame and guilt (Power & Dalgleish, 2008). At the same time, this stable and complex pattern closely related to behavioral and cognitive processing is assumed to be served as an emotional aspect of self-schema (Powell et al., 2015a).
Self-directed disgust is conceptualized initially as a vulnerability factor for depression (Overton et al., 2008) and contemporary studies support this association both in the short and long term (Powell, Simpson, & Overton, 2013; Simpson, Hillman, Crawford, & Overton, 2010). Moreover, there is a growing body of evidence indicating that this maladaptive pattern also predicts self-injury (Smith, Steele, Weitzman, Trueba, & Meuret, 2015), body dissatisfaction (Stasik-O'Brien & Schmidt, 2018), as well as the eating problems (Palmeira, Pinto-Gouveia, & Cunha, 2019). In addition to its direct role, the indirect effect of self-disgust has been highlighted in the relation between dysfunctional cognition and depression (Overton et al., 2008), between post-traumatic stress and suicidal tendency (Brake, Rojas, Badour, Dutton, & Feldner, 2017), and between loneliness and depression (Ypsilanti, Lazuras, Powell, & Overton, 2019).
Although self-disgust tends to be connected with various psychological problems; there is a need for research to highlight the explanatory mechanisms in these associations. The current study focused...