The Psychology (and Politics) of Disgust | Kathleen McAuliffe | Big Think

The Psychology (and Politics) of Disgust

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Who do you think has a stronger stomach: a liberal or a conservative? Who is the tougher party?

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KATHLEEN MCAULIFFE :

Kathleen McAuliffe’s articles, many featured on covers, have appeared in over a dozen national magazines, including Discover, The New York Times (both the Sunday Magazine and newspaper), US News & World Report, Smithsonian, Atlantic Monthly, More Magazine, Glamour, and Reader's Digest. In addition to being a feature writer, McAuliffe was a health columnist for More Magazine from 1999-2006. A decade earlier, she founded a quarterly newsletter put out by the American Foundation for AIDS Research, which she edited for the first year of its publication.  From 1985 to 1988, she was a senior editor at US News & World Report, focusing on the coverage of health and science. In the six years previous to this position, she was an editor at Omni Magazine, where she assigned and prepared science articles for publication. During that period, she also co-authored Life for Sale, one of the first popular books about the genetic engineering revolution

Her article, "Are We Evolving?", was featured in The Best American Science Writing 2010, edited by Jerome Groopman. The year before, she was awarded an Alicia Patterson Journalism Fellowship to study and report on human evolution. In 2000, she received an award from the National Coalition of Women With Heart Disease in recognition of excellence in journalism. Twelve years earlier, she was honored with the Institute of Food Technology award for outstanding writing on food science and nutrition. McAuliffe was also awarded a science writing fellowship in 1996 from the Marine Biological Laboratory at Woods Hole.

In 2011, McAuliffe was interviewed on the National Public Radio program All Things Considered, which devoted a segment to her article, "The Incredible Shrinking Brain." McAuliffe participated as a panelist on an hour-long PBS seminar, Our Genes/Our Choices, which aired across the US in the winter of 2003. She did script development and on-camera interviews for Omni: The New Frontier, a nationally syndicated TV series that began airing in October 1981. She has also appeared on other TV and radio programs. McAuliffe was educated at Trinity College Dublin, in Ireland, obtaining a M.A. in natural science after graduating with first-class honors. Her final year thesis on electro-encephalography (EEG) recordings of the human brain was presented at the Eastern Psychology Association Conference in 1977. McAuliffe and her husband – a research physicist at the University of Miami – are the parents of two teenagers and reside in Miami, Fl.

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TRANSCRIPT:

Kathleen McAuliffe: Similar parts of the brain - there's a lot of overlap in how we process both visceral disgust and moral disgust. Psychopaths - needless to say they're these cold-blooded killers are over representative in many of our high security jails. And these individuals show damage to many of the same circuits that are involved in disgust. Another group of individuals, although they're not predatory but people with Huntington's disease it also damages some of the circuits that are involved in disgust. People with Huntington's disease tend not to be empathetic and they think that this is related to these circuits being damaged. And they're almost unique in that they experience almost no visceral disgust whatsoever. So somebody with Huntington's disease, for example, would think nothing of picking up feces with their bare hands. So there is this sort of very interesting interrelationship, at least in the brain, between visceral and moral disgust.

A little known fact is that conservatives are more disgust sensitive. There's a huge variation acrostic populations in how disgust sensitive people are. There's actually standardized scales that measure, for example, the questionnaire you fill out and it will ask you questions about like how revolted you would be If you stepped on dog poop or if you saw a cockroach on pizza or a dirty toilet. And as a result of filling out these questionnaires they've been able to look to see if there's parallels between how disgust sensitive someone is and how conservative they are. And indeed there is a correlation. And probably the reason for that is because, again, the conservatives if you kind of really breakdown their belief systems they tend to have conservative sexual values. So, for example,...

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