Podcast: That's So Gross! (Or Is It?)

As someone with an extremely sensitive sense of smell, who tends to get grossed out a lot, I found this episode of Hidden Brain about disgust and how this emotion is acquired very informing.

What makes people feel disgust at a pair of smelly shoes, but delight at a sniff of equally smelly cheese?, Shankar Vedantam offers as food for thought in this podcast. As you may have intuited, the answer has to do with learned behaviour and the culture we grow up in. The guest on this show, psychologist Rachel Herz, remembers a childhood road trip she took with her parents. As they were driving through sunny green fields, her mom took a deep breath of the air that was coming in through the open car windows and exclaimed: ‘I love this smell!’ Rachel then felt the same smell one day while playing with her friends and repeated what she had heard her mom say, only to see her playmates leave her side disgusted. It turns out the 'lovely' smell was coming from a skunk.

Further on we find out about the contagion factor. That is, why is it that one cockroach destroys the appeal of a bowl of cherries, but a single cherry doesn’t make a bowl of cockroaches appealing? Because negativity is much stronger and more prevalent, says Rachel Herz.

And this is in fact adaptive, because it’s better to be worried about things that can harm us than overly excited about things that might be benevolent.