Stewart, Patrick A, Adams, Thomas G and Senior, Carl (2020). The Effect of Trait and State Disgust on Fear of God and Sin. Frontiers in Psychology, 11 ,
Abstract
There is a growing literature suggesting disgust plays a major role in religiosity. However, the relationships between specific domains of disgust sensitivity and general religious fundamentalism or religious scrupulosity remains unknown and a lack of experimental data prevents the drawing of causal inferences about the potential effects of disgust on religiosity. Two studies are reported that examined the relationship between specific types of disgust sensitivity (i.e., pathogen, sexual, and moral disgust) and specific religious beliefs (i.e., fear of sin and fear of God). In the first study it was found that sexual disgust and pathogen disgust were significantly correlated with fear of sin and fear of God, respectively. In the second study the experimental induction of disgust led to greater fear of sin but not to the fear of God. These findings suggest that pathogen and sexual disgust sensitivities may serve as effective mechanisms for inflated scrupulosity. Taken together the outcomes from both studies converge on a greater understanding of the 'Human Behavioral Immune System' model that can account for social behavior with the evolution of adaptive benefit and perhaps more importantly highlights the possible drivers of specific religious behavior.
Publication DOI: | https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2020.00051 |
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Divisions: | College of Health & Life Sciences > School of Psychology |
Additional Information: | © 2020 Stewart, Adams and Senior. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms. |
Uncontrolled Keywords: | Human Behavioral Immune System (HBIS),disgust,religion,scrupulosity,sexuality,General Psychology |
Publication ISSN: | 1664-1078 |
Last Modified: | 06 Aug 2024 08:46 |
Date Deposited: | 02 Mar 2020 14:48 |
Full Text Link: | |
Related URLs: |
http://www.scop ... tnerID=8YFLogxK
(Scopus URL) https://www.fro ... 2020.00051/full (Publisher URL) |
PURE Output Type: | Article |
Published Date: | 2020-01-29 |
Accepted Date: | 2020-01-08 |
Authors: |
Stewart, Patrick A
Adams, Thomas G Senior, Carl ( ![]() |