‘you are not what you eat’: no influence of individuals’ dietary preferences and disgust sensitivity on emotional attentional capture for pathogen and animal-reminder disgust

Abstract

The emotional attentional blink (EAB) is a phenomenon that highlights the ubiquitous impact of an irrelevant emotional stimulus on a neutral target using the Rapid Serial Visual Presentation (RSVP) paradigm. The present study examines how the individuals’ pathogen and animal-reminder disgust sensitivity coupled with their dietary preferences modulates the EAB. Previous literature has shown that disgusting stimuli are more distracting and attention-grabbing than fear-eliciting stimuli due to the adaptive functions of disgust, making it more salient. It has also been found that vegetarians, especially those who avoid meat on moral grounds, are more disgusted by meat. The main prediction was that individuals higher on disgust sensitivity would be more inaccurate in detecting the target when a disgusting stimulus (dead, harmed, or butchered animals and rotten food) precedes it in an RSVP task. It was also expected that vegetarians, in general, and moral vegetarians, in particular, would be more disgust-sensitive than non-vegetarians and, therefore, show more difficulties in detecting the target when a disgusting stimulus precedes it. Contrary to our expectations, results suggest no association between dietary preferences and disgust sensitivity and that these variables have no impact on the EAB of the participants. The findings are discussed considering the previous studies about EAB and disgust and diet and disgust.