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Gut Check: Reappraisal of Disgust Helps Explain Liberal-Conservative Differences on Issues of Purity

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Disgust plays an important role in conservatives' moral and political judgments, helping to explain why conservatives and liberals differ in their attitudes on issues related to purity. We examined the extent to which the emotion-regulation strategy reappraisal drives the disgust-conservatism relationship. We hypothesized that disgust has less influence on the political and moral judgments of liberals because they tend to regulate disgust reactions through emotional reappraisal more than conservatives. Study 1a found that a greater tendency to reappraise disgust was negatively associated with conservatism, independent of disgust sensitivity. Study 1b replicated this finding, demonstrating that the effect of reappraisal is unique to disgust. In Study 2, liberals condemned a disgusting act less than conservatives, and did so to the extent that they reappraised their initial disgust response. Study 3 manipulated participants' use of reappraisal when exposed to a video of men kissing. Conservatives instructed to reappraise their emotional reactions subsequently expressed more support for same-sex marriage than conservatives in the control condition, demonstrating attitudes statistically equivalent to liberal participants. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2013 APA, all rights reserved).
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Emotion
Gut Check: Reappraisal of Disgust Helps Explain
Liberal–Conservative Differences on Issues of Purity
Matthew Feinberg, Olga Antonenko, Robb Willer, E. J. Horberg, and Oliver P. John
Online First Publication, October 7, 2013. doi: 10.1037/a0033727
CITATION
Feinberg, M., Antonenko, O., Willer, R., Horberg, E. J., & John, O. P. (2013, October 7). Gut
Check: Reappraisal of Disgust Helps Explain Liberal–Conservative Differences on Issues of
Purity. Emotion. Advance online publication. doi: 10.1037/a0033727
Gut Check: Reappraisal of Disgust Helps Explain Liberal–Conservative
Differences on Issues of Purity
Matthew Feinberg
Stanford University
Olga Antonenko
University of California, Berkeley
Robb Willer
Stanford University
E. J. Horberg
Stanford University
Oliver P. John
University of California, Berkeley
Disgust plays an important role in conservatives’ moral and political judgments, helping to explain why
conservatives and liberals differ in their attitudes on issues related to purity. We examined the extent to
which the emotion-regulation strategy reappraisal drives the disgust– conservatism relationship. We
hypothesized that disgust has less influence on the political and moral judgments of liberals because they
tend to regulate disgust reactions through emotional reappraisal more than conservatives. Study 1a found
that a greater tendency to reappraise disgust was negatively associated with conservatism, independent
of disgust sensitivity. Study 1b replicated this finding, demonstrating that the effect of reappraisal is
unique to disgust. In Study 2, liberals condemned a disgusting act less than conservatives, and did so to
the extent that they reappraised their initial disgust response. Study 3 manipulated participants’ use of
reappraisal when exposed to a video of men kissing. Conservatives instructed to reappraise their
emotional reactions subsequently expressed more support for same-sex marriage than conservatives in
the control condition, demonstrating attitudes statistically equivalent to liberal participants.
Keywords: disgust, emotion regulation, morality, political attitudes, conservatism
Why do liberals and conservatives differ so greatly on highly
contested social issues such as same-sex marriage and abortion?
Recent research suggests that the emotion of disgust plays a
significant role in explaining political polarization on such
purity-related issues. Both Trait levels of disgust sensitivity and
induced experience of disgust predict more conservative stances
on such issues (Helzer & Pizzaro, 2011; Inbar, Pizarro, &
Bloom, 2009, 2012; Inbar, Pizarro, Knobe, & Bloom, 2009).
Here, we build on this past research on the role of disgust in
moral and political judgments, specifically exploring how dif-
ferences between liberals and conservatives in the regulation of
disgust help explain their divergent attitudes on purity-related
issues.
The Moral Functions of Disgust
Theorists have argued that, in the course of evolution, disgust
reactions were selected for because they guided humans to
avoid ingesting potentially dangerous substances (Rozin & Fal-
lon, 1987). However, many have postulated that disgust has
also come to be linked with moral judgment, leading individ-
uals to avoid others who might be immoral, and therefore
potentially physically and socially dangerous (Schaller & Dun-
can, 2007). Recent research supports this view of disgust as a
fundamental moral emotion. When a stimulus evokes disgust,
individuals are much more likely to condemn acts or individuals
associated with the stimulus (Haidt, Koller, & Dias, 1993;
Haidt, Rozin, McCauley, & Imada, 1997). In many cases,
participants are unable to verbalize an explanation for their
judgment, except to simply say that the act was disgusting—a
phenomenon referred to as “moral dumbfounding” (Haidt,
2001). Moreover, research finds that inducing disgust can in-
fluence moral judgments. For example, study participants ex-
posed to a disgusting stimulus, such as a foul smell or taste,
became harsher judges of impure or morally questionable be-
havior than individuals not exposed to the disgust elicitor
(Eskine, Kacinik, & Prinz, 2011; Horberg, Oveis, Keltner, &
Cohen, 2009; Schnall, Haidt, Clore, & Jordan, 2008). In other
research, participants who received hypnotic suggestions to
experience disgust when exposed to neutral words while read-
ing about a target judged the target’s behavior as more inap-
Matthew Feinberg, Graduate School of Business, Center for Compassion
and Altruism Research and Education, Stanford University; Olga An-
tonenko, Department of Psychology, University of California, Berkeley;
Robb Willer, Department of Sociology, Stanford University; E. J. Horberg,
Department of Psychology, Stanford University; Oliver P. John, Depart-
ment of Sociology, University of California, Berkeley.
Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Matthew
Feinberg, Center for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education,
Stanford University, 306 Jordan Hall, Stanford, CA 94305. E-mail:
mfeinber@stanford.edu
This document is copyrighted by the American Psychological Association or one of its allied publishers.
This article is intended solely for the personal use of the individual user and is not to be disseminated broadly.
Emotion © 2013 American Psychological Association
2013, Vol. 13, No. 3, 000 1528-3542/13/$12.00 DOI: 10.1037/a0033727
1
propriate than did those not hypnotized to experience such
disgust (Wheatley & Haidt, 2005).
Disgust and Political Ideology
Many of the most polarizing political issues, such as the per-
missibility of same-sex marriage, sex education, and abortion, fall
within the moral domain of purity and sanctity (Graham, Haidt, &
Nosek, 2009; Inbar et al., 2009). Conservatives typically oppose
such acts, whereas liberals are generally more accepting of them.
Recent research has associated disgust with conservative positions
on such purity-related political topics. For example, induced dis-
gust experience, such as disgusting smells (Inbar, Pizarro, &
Bloom, 2012), result in more conservative attitudes, including less
warmth toward homosexual men. In addition, sensitivity to disgust
is associated with general conservatism and conservative attitudes
toward abortion and same-sex marriage (Inbar et al., 2009). To-
gether these studies suggest that conservatives and liberals differ
on purity issues because conservatives are more disgust sensitive
than are liberals.
We argue that the link between disgust and politics may be
attributable not only to different levels of disgust sensitivity but
also to chronically different reactions to the emotional experience
of disgust. Applying an emotion regulation perspective (Gross,
2007) to the disgust– conservatism link, we hypothesize that lib-
erals and conservatives differ in their use of the emotion regulation
strategy of reappraisal in response to feelings of disgust, over and
above their tendencies to experience disgust in the first place. In
particular, we propose that liberals are more likely to reappraise
disgust than conservatives, and that this helps explain the two
sides’ opposing positions on purity-related issues.
Emotion Regulation and Moral Judgment
Central to research on emotion regulation is the claim that
individuals do not merely experience emotions—they control and
alter their emotions using different regulation strategies (Gross &
John, 2003). One common regulation strategy is reappraisal, which
involves “rethinking the meaning of affectively charged stimuli or
events in terms that alter their emotional impact” (Ochsner &
Gross, 2008, p. 154). Reappraisal usually occurs early upon the
onset of an emotion, changing the whole trajectory of the emo-
tional experience so that the intensity of the emotion is downregu-
lated and minimized, resulting in the emotion having less influence
on the individual’s subsequent cognitions and behaviors (Gross &
John, 2003). Importantly, we focus here on reappraisal because,
unlike other regulation strategies that mask one’s emotions (e.g.,
suppression), reappraisal diminishes the experience of an emotion
(Gross, 1998) and has been shown to directly influence reactions
to, and judgments of, emotion-eliciting situations (Feinberg,
Willer, Antonenko, & John, 2012).
Although research has established the “primacy of intuition” in
the moral judgment process (Haidt, 2007), reappraisal can greatly
reduce the influence of emotion-laden intuitions, leading individ-
uals to make more deliberative moral judgments (Feinberg et al.,
2012). Those who chronically reappraise, or who are primed to do
so, are significantly less likely to make intuitionist moral judg-
ments about disgusting but harmless acts. Synthesizing prior work
on disgust and reappraisal’s influence on moral judgments, we
hypothesize that liberals are more likely to reappraise disgust and,
as a result, are more accepting and less morally judgmental of
behavior that might seem impure. Further, differences in reap-
praisal tendency, we contend, will help explain the different po-
litical attitudes liberals and conservatives have regarding many
polarizing issues such as same-sex marriage.
We test our hypotheses across four studies. In Study 1a, we
examine the relationship between chronic disgust reappraisal and
political ideology. In Study 1b, we further examine this relation-
ship while also examining the extent to which this relationship is
unique to the tendency to reappraise disgust and not other emo-
tions. Then, in Study 2, we explore the extent to which disgust
reappraisal can explain the different moral judgments liberals and
conservatives make when confronted with a disgust-eliciting be-
havior. Finally, in Study 3, we manipulate participants’ use of
disgust reappraisal when confronted with a film clip of men
kissing, and subsequently measure moral and political attitudes
regarding same-sex marriage.
Study 1a
In Study 1a, we test the hypothesized relationship between
political ideology and the chronic tendency to reappraise one’s
disgust. We collect measures of both trait-level disgust reappraisal
and disgust suppression to determine if any relationship between
regulation and political ideology is specific to reappraisal or asso-
ciated, more generally, with emotion regulation. We assess polit-
ical ideology by measuring both attitudes on purity-related polit-
ical issues and by asking participants to indicate how liberal or
conservative they view themselves to be in general. Finally, as
control variables, we include disgust sensitivity and religiosity
measures to examine whether the proposed association between
reappraisal and political ideology exists even when taking into
account these other related variables.
Method
Participants. One hundred twenty-five participants (55
males, 70 females) were recruited from across the United States
via Amazon Mechanical Turk.
1
Participants received modest com-
pensation in exchange for their participation.
Procedure. Participants completed a four-item disgust regu-
lation measure modeled after the Emotion Regulation Question-
naire (Gross & John, 2003). Two items measured participants’
tendency to reappraise in response to disgust elicitors (“When I’m
faced with a disgusting situation, I make myself think about it in
a way that helps me not feel disgusted”; “When I want to feel less
disgust, I change the way I’m thinking about the situation”; ␣⫽
.72). The other two items measured the tendency to use expressive
suppression, another emotion regulation strategy, in response to
disgust elicitors (“I keep my feelings of disgust to myself”; “When
I feel disgusted, I am careful not to express it”; ␣⫽.87). This was
included for purposes of establishing discriminant validity.
Participants indicated on 7-point scales the extent to which they
identified as liberal or conservative in general, liberal or conser-
vative on social issues, and as a Democrat or Republican. Partic-
1
Without prior precedent, we estimated that such a sample size would
be large enough to minimize the risk of a Type II error.
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2FEINBERG, ANTONENKO, WILLER, HORBERG, AND JOHN
ipants also completed a four-item abortion attitudes questionnaire
(e.g., “Abortion should be made illegal”; ␣⫽.87), and a four-item
measure of attitudes toward same-sex marriage (e.g., “The gov-
ernment should allow same-sex couples to marry legally”; ␣⫽
.98). Participants indicated the extent to which they agreed with
each item on a 7-point scale ranging from 1 (strongly disagree)to
7(strongly agree). Higher scores on each measure represented the
more conservative position.
Participants also completed the 27-item disgust sensitivity mea-
sure (Haidt, McCauley, & Rozin, 1994, modified by Olatunji et al.,
2007; ␣⫽.79) for use as a covariate in analyses. Similarly,
because previous research has found a relationship between dis-
gust sensitivity and religiosity (Inbar, Pizzaro, & Bloom, 2009;
Inbar, Pizzaro, Iyer, & Haidt, 2012), and because religious doc-
trines often encourage emotion regulation (e.g., “A hot-tempered
man stirs up strife, but he who is slow to anger quiets contention”
[Proverbs 15:18]), we asked participants to indicate how religious
they were on a 7-point scale ranging from 0 (not at all)to6
(extremely) and include this measure as a covariate in analyses.
Results and Discussion
Table 1 provides the zero-order correlations for all variables.
2
As hypothesized, conservatism was negatively correlated with
disgust reappraisal; more conservative participants reported being
less likely to employ disgust reappraisal when facing a disgust
elicitor. There was no significant relationship between the conser-
vatism measures and disgust suppression, suggesting that liberals
and conservatives differ in disgust reappraisal but not disgust
suppression. In addition, in line with past research, conservatism
correlated positively with disgust sensitivity.
In an effort to establish the unique influence of disgust reap-
praisal while controlling for disgust sensitivity and religiosity, we
ran separate regression analyses, entering disgust reappraisal, dis-
gust sensitivity, and religiosity as predictors of each of our mea-
sures of conservatism. Results of these models are given in Table
1. In each of these models, reappraisal remained a significant
predictor of conservatism.
Study 1b
Although Study 1a’s results demonstrate that disgust reappraisal
predicts conservatism, it leaves open the possibility that this find-
ing reflects a more general relationship between emotion reap-
praisal and conservatism. It is possible that conservatism might be
related to reappraisal of emotions in general, especially consider-
ing some past research and theory suggesting that conservatives
are more driven by intuition than liberals (e.g., Haidt & Hersh,
2001). On a related note, considering past research has found a
strong overlap between scoring lower on cognitive complexity (the
extent to which individuals integrate and synthesize multidimen-
sional perspectives when reaching a decision) and conservatism
(Jost, Glaser, Kruglanski, & Sulloway, 2003; Tetlock, 1983), it is
possible that our measure of reappraisal—which involves chang-
ing the way one thinks about stimuli—is in fact measuring cog-
nitive complexity.
To address these concerns, in Study 1b, we replicate Study 1a’s
procedure but measure different types of reappraisal tendency—
specifically, tendencies to reappraise disgust, anger, and negative
emotions in general. We measure the tendency to reappraise neg-
ative emotion in general to account for the possibility conserva-
tives might reappraise all negative emotions more than liberals.
Additionally, we chose to examine the tendency to reappraise
anger specifically, because anger is an important intergroup emo-
tion that has been associated with conservatism in prior research
(de St Aubin, 1996; Lerner, Gonzalez, Small, & Fischhoff, 2003;
Skitka & Tetlock, 1993). If, as we hypothesize, only disgust
reappraisal tendency is significantly related to conservatism, it
would help demonstrate the unique relationship between disgust
reappraisal and conservatism, further suggesting that disgust reap-
praisal is not simply serving as a proxy for cognitive complexity.
Method
Participants. One hundred sixty-two participants (84 male,
78 female) were recruited from across the United States via Am-
azon Mechanical Turk. Participants received modest compensation
in exchange for their participation.
Procedure. The procedure followed that of Study 1a, with
participants completing the same measures of conservatism and
disgust reappraisal tendency (␣⫽.84). However, in Study 1b,
participants completed two other measures of reappraisal tendency
that paralleled the disgust reappraisal measure. The first measured
participants’ tendency to reappraise in response to negative emo-
tion elicitors in general (e.g., “When I want to feel less negative
emotion, I change the way I’m thinking about the situation”; ␣⫽
.89). The second measured participants’ tendency to reappraise in
response to anger elicitors (e.g., “When I want to feel less anger,
I change the way I’m thinking about the situation”; ␣⫽.90).
Results and Discussion
We present the zero-order correlations between each of the
reappraisal and conservatism measures in Table 2. As in Study 1a,
we found a significant negative relationship between conservatism
and disgust reappraisal. However, there were no significant corre-
lations between conservatism and the other two measures of reap-
praisal tendency, suggesting that the relationship between reap-
praisal and conservatism is specific to disgust. To further establish
the unique association between disgust reappraisal and conserva-
tism, we ran a series of regression analyses, entering all three of
the reappraisal measures as simultaneous predictors of each of the
conservatism measures (see Table 2). Results of these analyses
reveal that only disgust reappraisal tendency significantly pre-
dicted conservatism, suggesting that there is a unique relationship
between disgust reappraisal and conservatism.
3
In fact, it seems
that the measures of negative emotion reappraisal and anger reap-
praisal tended to be positively associated (though not significantly)
with conservatism. Additionally, by demonstrating that not all
2
We report how we determined our sample sizes, all data exclusions, all
conditions, and all measures in our studies.
3
In a separate study aiming to verify the uniqueness of disgust reap-
praisal’s relationship with conservatism, we collected measures of conser-
vatism and had participants (N607) complete the 10-item Emotion
Regulation Questionnaire (Gross & John, 2003), which measures individ-
uals’ general tendency to reappraise and suppress positive and negative
emotions. We found no significant relationship between political ideology
and the more global measures of reappraisal (r.03, p.41).
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3
DISGUST REAPPRAISAL AND POLITICAL ATTITUDES
forms of reappraisal predict conservatism, these results provide
evidence that our measure of disgust reappraisal tendency is an
independent construct from cognitive complexity.
Study 2
The aim of Studies 2 and 3 is to test whether differences in
disgust reappraisal can account for the diverging moral and polit-
ical judgments that liberals and conservatives make when it comes
to issues of purity. Past research has established that conservatives
are more likely to form intuitionist moral judgments in such
domains (Haidt & Hersh, 2001). In Study 2, we examine whether
this pattern is attributable to different tendencies to reappraise
disgust. Specifically, we present participants with vignettes de-
scribing disgust-eliciting behaviors and measure both participants’
moral judgments of the act and the extent to which participants
engaged in emotion reappraisal in forming these judgments. Tak-
ing into consideration the results of Studies 1a and 1b, coupled
with recent findings showing that reappraisal leads to more delib-
erative moral judgments by weakening the influence of affectively
laden moral intuitions to condemn an act (Feinberg et al., 2012),
we expect that liberals will be more accepting of the vignette
targets’ disgust-eliciting behaviors because they will reappraise
disgust more.
Method
Participants. One hundred fifty-one undergraduates (44
males, 107 females) completed an online survey in return for
course credit.
4
Procedure. After reporting the extent to which they identified
as socially liberal or conservative using the same measure used in
Study 1, participants were exposed to two vignettes shown to elicit
strong disgust reactions (Haidt et al., 1993). The first describes
siblings who engage in consensual sex after taking every possible
precaution to avoid pregnancy or emotional complications. The
second describes a man who buys a dead chicken, has sex with it,
and then cooks and eats it in the privacy of his own home. Past
research has employed these vignettes to demonstrate the role
disgust plays in shaping moral judgments by triggering moral
intuitions about the appropriateness of the target’s behavior (Haidt
et al., 1993; Haidt & Hersh, 2001). This research finds that many
participants will condemn the acts, although they cannot explain
why the action is morally wrong, only that it is disgusting and feels
wrong. Importantly, Haidt and Hersh (2001) found that, relative to
liberals, conservatives were significantly more likely to find the
targets’ behavior immoral. Further, past research has found that a
robust determinant of whether participants condemn these acts is
the extent to which they reappraised their disgust upon reading the
vignettes (Feinberg et al., 2012)—the more they reappraised, the
less likely they were to deem the act immoral. Based on these
previous findings, these vignettes provide a useful tool for testing
our hypothesis that conservatives will be more likely to morally
condemn a disgust evoking behavior than liberals because liberals
will reappraise their disgust reaction more than conservatives.
Following Feinberg et al.’s (2012) procedure, participants read
each vignette and indicated how immoral they perceived the be-
havior of the targets to be on a scale from 1 (not at all)to7
(extremely). Participants then indicated what emotion(s) they felt
upon first reading the vignette. A large majority reported experi-
encing disgust (incest vignette, 84%; chicken vignette, 85%).
Finally, participants were asked to write three to five sentences in
response to the following open-ended question: “What happened
in your head from the first moment you felt the emotion until the
moment you decided whether this action was right or wrong?”
Four trained coders blind to hypotheses coded participants’
descriptions to the open-ended question using the same reappraisal
indicators established by Feinberg et al. (2012): coders indicated
the extent to which participants (a) “attempted to reappraise the felt
emotion,” and (b) “changed the way he or she thought about the
scenario to decrease emotional reaction.” Intercoder reliability for
each indicator was high (s.80). The two reappraisal indicators
were highly correlated for each vignette (s.90), so we aver-
aged them together to form a composite for each vignette. The
4
This sample size reflects the number of students in the course who
were willing to participate.
Table 1
Zero-Order Correlations and Standardized Regression Weights With R
2
Measurements Depicting the Associations Between
Reappraisal, Suppression, Disgust Sensitivity, Religiosity, and Various Measures of Conservatism (Study 1)
General
conservatism
Social
conservatism Republican
Same-sex marriage
opposition
Abortion
opposition
Zero-order correlations
Emotion regulation
Disgust reappraisal .27
ⴱⴱ
.30
ⴱⴱⴱ
.20
.19
.19
Disgust suppression .02 .03 .03 .02 .01
Control variables
Disgust sensitivity .14 .14 .12 .29
ⴱⴱ
.28
ⴱⴱ
Religiosity .38
ⴱⴱⴱ
.49
ⴱⴱⴱ
.35
ⴱⴱⴱ
.52
ⴱⴱⴱ
.60
ⴱⴱⴱ
Standardized regression weights
Disgust reappraisal (controlling for
sensitivity, religiosity)
.26
ⴱⴱ
.28
ⴱⴱ
.19
.16
.16
Disgust sensitivity (controlling for
reappraisal, religiosity)
.01 .03 .00 .13 .10
Full model R
2
.21
ⴱⴱⴱ
.32
ⴱⴱⴱ
.16
ⴱⴱⴱ
.31
ⴱⴱⴱ
.40
ⴱⴱⴱ
p.05.
ⴱⴱ
p.01.
ⴱⴱⴱ
p.001.
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4FEINBERG, ANTONENKO, WILLER, HORBERG, AND JOHN
following are examples of responses coded as clear evidence for
high and low reappraisal in the chicken and incest vignettes:
High:
“I felt disgusted at first but treated it immediately as a hypothetical
situation, so I didn’t feel as intense. I realized that the people involved
didn’t harm anybody and I really have no right to judge them on their
actions.”
“At first it is pretty gross and you think ‘how could he?’ But then you
realize that the chicken and his encounter with it are within the
privacy of his apartment, he’s not hurting anyone and he seems to get
some enjoyment out of it.”
Low:
“I felt disgusted that the both of them actually decided to have sex.
Having sex with your sibling is JUST wrong to me.”
“I didn’t think much about it, except how disgusting the man was for
doing that . . . there must be something wrong with him to do some-
thing of that nature. I also felt that he had no morals.”
Results and Discussion
In line with previous research (Haidt & Hersh, 2001), there was
a significant positive association between political conservatism
and the extent to which participants rated the behavior of the
targets as immoral (incest: r.28, p.001; chicken: r.29, p
.001). Further, consistent with Study 1’s findings, there was a
significant negative relationship between conservatism and disgust
reappraisal (incest: r⫽⫺.31, p.001; chicken: r⫽⫺.28, p
.001), and also a strong negative relationship between rated disgust
reappraisal and judgments of immorality (incest: r⫽⫺.63, p
.001; chicken: r⫽⫺.59, p.001.
To test whether disgust reappraisal significantly mediated the
effect of political ideology on participants’ judgments of immo-
rality, we ran a regression, entering both political ideology and
disgust reappraisal as simultaneous predictors. This analysis re-
vealed that for both vignettes, reappraisal remained a significant
predictor of moral judgments (incest: ␤⫽⫺0.60, p.001;
chicken: ␤⫽⫺0.55, p.001), whereas political ideology was no
longer significant for the incest vignette, ␤⫽.09, p.16, and a
much weaker predictor for the chicken vignette, ␤⫽.14, p.05.
Bootstrap analyses (Preacher & Hayes, 2004) revealed that the
95% confidence interval for the indirect effect did not include 0
(incest: [.12, .32]; chicken: [.09, .30]). These mediation results
indicate that liberals’ moral judgments were less driven by disgust-
elicited moral intuitions because they regulated their experience of
disgust through reappraisal more than conservatives did. Such
results suggest that liberals engage in more deliberative reasoning
and are ultimately more accepting of impure behavior because they
override their disgust more than conservatives.
Study 3
Study 3 examines whether differences in disgust reappraisal can
help explain the contrasting attitudes liberals and conservatives have
on political issues related to purity. Unlike the first two studies, in
Study 3, we used an experimental manipulation to directly test the
causal influence of disgust reappraisal. We manipulated whether
participants were instructed to reappraise their emotional reactions to
a video clip of two men passionately kissing one another, and then
asked participants about their attitudes regarding same-sex marriage.
We hypothesized that conservative participants in the reappraisal
condition would be less likely to perceive homosexual relationships as
immoral, relative to their conservative counterparts in the control
condition, and, as a¹result, would also be more accepting of same-sex
marriage. In contrast, we expected no difference between conditions
for liberals’ views of homosexuality or same-sex marriage.
Method
Participants. Fifty-nine participants (12 male, 47 female)
were recruited via the craigslist.org Web sites of 15 different U.S.
cities. As compensation, participants were entered into a raffle for
a $50 gift certificate.
5
Procedure. The study was advertised as an online survey
exploring whether cultural views and emotional reactions can help
predict Academy Award winners. Participants first completed a
demographic questionnaire that included the same measure of
5
We aimed to collect at least 20 participants per condition to achieve
enough statistical power to test our hypotheses. The sample size reflects the
total number of participants recruited over a 2-week period of time.
Table 2
Zero-Order Correlations, Standardized Regression Weights With R
2
Measurements Depicting the Associations Between the Different
Types of Reappraisal and Various Measures of Conservatism (Study 1)
General
conservatism
Social
conservatism Republican
Same-sex marriage
opposition
Abortion
opposition
Zero-order correlations
Reappraisal type
Disgust .16
.15
.16
.19
.15
Anger .06 .01 .01 .07 .07
Negative emotions .06 .04 .06 .03 .05
Standardized regression weights (all three types entered simultaneously)
Disgust .23
ⴱⴱ
.20
.21
.27
ⴱⴱ
.15
Anger .09 .02 .05 .14 .03
Negative emotions .10 .11 .18 .05 .03
Full model R
2
.05
.04 .05
.06
.02
p.10.
p.05.
ⴱⴱ
p.01.
ⴱⴱⴱ
p.001.
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5
DISGUST REAPPRAISAL AND POLITICAL ATTITUDES
liberalism– conservatism used in the previous studies. Participants
then learned that they would watch a series of film clips from
Oscar-winning movies and answer various questions regarding the
clips. Depending on condition, participants were asked to simply
watch the clips (control condition) or to watch and “try to think
about what you are seeing in such a way that you don’t feel
anything at all” (reappraisal condition; Feinberg et al., 2012;
Gross, 1998; Richards & Gross, 2000). Prior to watching each film
clip, the instructions reminded participants in the reappraisal con-
dition of their assignment. All participants in the reappraisal con-
dition passed a comprehension check verifying they understood
the instructions.
Participants first watched two 45-s film clips from the movies
Shawshank Redemption and Forrest Gump, and answered ques-
tions about each film and their attitudes about a political issue the
clip touched upon (the prison system for Shawshank Redemption
and care for wounded veterans for Forrest Gump). The third clip
was a 45-s scene from the movie Brokeback Mountain, in which
two men passionately kiss and embrace one another. Following the
clip, participants completed a questionnaire regarding their atti-
tudes toward the film. They also completed an item measuring
their perceptions of homosexuality as immoral (“Homosexual re-
lationships between consenting adults are morally wrong”) and the
four-item support for same-sex marriage measure used in Study 1
(␣⫽.97). Finally, participants were asked what they thought the
study was about and what hypothesis we were testing. No partic-
ipants correctly guessed the purpose of the study.
Results and Discussion
We hypothesized that conservative participants in the reap-
praisal condition would indicate significantly more positive atti-
tudes toward homosexual relationships than their conservative
counterparts in the control condition. To test this hypothesis, we
ran separate multiple regression analyses, entering experimental
condition, political ideology (kept continuous and standardized),
and the interaction of the two as predictors of each measure of
attitudes toward homosexual relationships.
A first regression predicting perceptions of homosexuality as
immoral yielded significant main effects of condition, ␤⫽⫺.24,
p.05, and political ideology, ␤⫽.84, p.001, and a
significant Condition Ideology interaction, ␤⫽⫺.47, p.01.
6
A simple-slopes analysis comparing conservatives (participants
scoring 1 standard deviation above the mean) in the reappraisal
condition with their counterparts in the control condition revealed
that conservative participants in the reappraisal condition found
homosexual relationships to be significantly less immoral, b
1.36, p.001 (see Figure 1). There was no significant effect of
condition on the reported attitudes of liberal participants (partici-
pants scoring 1 standard deviation below the mean), b.15, p
.69. Moreover, although there was a main effect of political ide-
ology, with conservatives perceiving homosexual relationships as
more immoral, the difference between the liberal and conservative
participants in the reappraisal condition was not significant, b
.31, p.08.
Using a parallel statistical procedure, we found similar results
for same-sex marriage attitudes. We found no main effect of
condition, ␤⫽.10, p.38, but did find a significant main effect
of political ideology, ␤⫽⫺.90, p.001, and a significant
Condition Ideology interaction, ␤⫽.53, p.01 (see Figure 1).
Conservative participants in the reappraisal condition demon-
strated significantly greater support for same-sex marriage than
their counterparts in the control condition, b1.19, p.01.
There was no difference due to condition for the liberal partici-
pants, b⫽⫺.66, p.12. Once again, there was no significant
difference between the liberal and conservative participants in the
reappraisal condition, b⫽⫺.30, p.12.
Finally, we conducted a mediated moderation analysis (Muller,
Judd, & Yzerbt, 2005) to test whether the interactive effect of
political ideology and experimental condition on same-sex mar-
riage attitudes was due to perceptions of homosexual relationships
being immoral. Figure 2 depicts the results of this analysis. In line
with our hypothesis, these results indicate that conservative par-
ticipants in the reappraisal condition demonstrated higher levels of
support for same-sex marriage to the extent they perceived homo-
sexual relationships to be less immoral.
6
As expected, there was no effect of condition or Political Ideology
Condition interaction in predicting participant attitudes toward the prison
system or veterans, ts1.05, ps.30.
Figure 1. The interaction between experimental condition and political
ideology predicting perceptions that homosexuality is immoral (Panel A)
and same-sex marriage attitudes (Panel B) (Study 3).
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6FEINBERG, ANTONENKO, WILLER, HORBERG, AND JOHN
Although these findings support our hypotheses, there could be
concern that the reappraisal instructions prompted participants to
be more open-minded about same-sex marriage. However, we
believe demand effects likely do not account for our results be-
cause only the conservative participants in the reappraisal condi-
tion demonstrated an increase in support for same-sex marriage. If
demand effects were driving the results, we would likely have
found an increase in support for same-sex marriage from liberal
participants as well. But, as Figure 1 shows, liberal participants
actually demonstrated slightly less support (though not significant)
for same-sex marriage in the reappraisal condition. Additionally,
past research finds that when participants recognize someone is
trying to persuade them to agree with a moral or political stance
contrary to their own, they tend to demonstrate a reactance effect
(Brehm, 1966; Dillard & Shen, 2005; Laurin, Kay, & Fitzsimons,
2012). This research suggests that, if anything, we would expect
conservative participants to demonstrate lower levels of support
for same-sex marriage in the reappraisal condition.
Overall, then, the results of Study 3 provide experimental evi-
dence for our argument that inducing conservatives to regulate
their disgust made them more accepting of homosexual relation-
ships. When conservative participants were exposed to a clip
depicting two men kissing, those instructed to reappraise their
emotions subsequently perceived homosexual relationships as less
immoral and demonstrated significantly greater support for same-
sex marriage. Moreover, the conservative participants in the reap-
praisal condition reported statistically equivalent views toward
homosexual relationships as the liberal participants, further em-
phasizing the strong influence reappraisal had on conservative
participants’ attitudes. Finally, the support we found for a medi-
ated moderation model is consistent with our argument that reap-
praising disgust-eliciting behaviors decreases the likelihood of
finding these behaviors to be immoral, and, as a result, leads
individuals to be more accepting of such behaviors.
General Discussion
Liberals and conservatives are sharply divided on political
issues related to moral purity. In the present research, we tested
the hypothesis that liberals are more likely to reappraise their
disgust, resulting in their being more accepting of behaviors
that could be construed as impure. Studies 1a and 1b established
that liberals and conservatives respond differently to disgust,
with liberals tending to reappraise the emotion more. Study 2
found that differences in reappraisal tendency helped account
for the differing attitudes of liberals and conservatives regard-
ing the immorality of sexual acts typically viewed as impure.
Finally, Study 3 demonstrated the influence of disgust reap-
praisal on participants’ moral and political attitudes toward
homosexuality. Conservatives in the reappraisal condition were
more accepting of homosexual relationships relative to their
counterparts in the control condition. Moreover, these conser-
vatives demonstrated similar attitudes toward homosexual re-
lationships as liberal participants, further highlighting the role
disgust reappraisal plays in explaining differences in liberal and
conservative attitudes on purity-related issues. Such results add
to the growing body of research on the role emotions play in
political judgments, especially disgust (Inbar, Pizzaro, Iyer, et
al., 2012; Westen, 2007), as well as the more general role
emotions and emotion regulation can play in the moral judg-
ment process (Feinberg et al., 2012).
Questions and Future Directions
Although our studies identify disgust reappraisal as a funda-
mental factor dividing liberal and conservative moral and po-
litical judgments, there are many questions left unanswered by
the present investigation. For instance, where does the link
between liberalism and disgust reappraisal come from? Possi-
bly, those who are more likely to reappraise disgust reactions
might be drawn to political liberalism. Alternatively, it could be
that those who are attracted to liberal positions come to reap-
praise their disgust reactions in service of maintaining liberal
positions on issues of purity. Future longitudinal research could
be useful for investigating this question.
Additionally, the present research raises questions about
when reappraisal occurs during the emotion-generative cycle.
Although Gross and colleagues (e.g., Gross & John, 2003;
Ochsner & Gross, 2008) refer to reappraisal as an “antecedent-
based emotion regulation strategy,” this may create some con-
fusion because it implies that reappraisal only takes place prior
to emotion elicitation, suggesting that individuals use reap-
praisal only in preparation for an anticipated encounter with an
emotionally evocative situation. However, Gross and Thomp-
son (2007) clarify that reappraisal should be considered
antecedent-focused, in that it typically happens early in the
emotion-generative process, before an initial appraisal leads to
a full-blown emotional reaction. Consistent with this view,
based on the present research, we believe that, when faced with
a disgust elicitor, liberals’ tendency to reappraise disgust occurs
early in the emotion-generative cycle, significantly curtailing
their experience of disgust. As a result of liberals downregu-
lating their disgust more than conservatives, liberals’ moral
judgments within the purity domain are likely based less on
affect-laden intuitions and, rather, are more deliberative (cf.,
Feinberg et al., 2012).
In addition, one might wonder to what extent differences
between liberals’ and conservatives’ attitudes in purity-related
Figure 2. Mediated moderation demonstrating that conservatives in the
reappraisal condition were more supportive of same-sex marriage (relative
to their counterparts in the control condition) to the extent that they
perceived homosexual relationships to be less immoral (Study 3). Sobel
Z2.42, p.05. Values presented without parentheses are standardized
multiple regression coefficients. Values in parentheses are zero-order cor-
relations.
p.05,
ⴱⴱ
p.01,
ⴱⴱⴱ
p.001.
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7
DISGUST REAPPRAISAL AND POLITICAL ATTITUDES
domains are due to disgust reappraisal versus disgust sensitiv-
ity. It is possible that the disgust– conservatism link is a product
of conservatives being both more disgust sensitive and less
likely to reappraise disgust, or possibly that liberals and con-
servatives are equally prone to the initial onset of disgust, and
only separated by how they regulate the emotion (Eskine et al.,
2011; Graham et al., 2013). Future research should further
explore how liberals and conservatives differentially react to
disgust elicitors, especially at the moment the elicitor first
presents itself.
Overall, the present research provides one answer to why
liberals and conservatives espouse such diverging attitudes
when it comes to issues of moral purity. More generally, this
research highlights the critical role of emotion regulation in
understanding moral and political reasoning processes. Devel-
oping a refined understanding of not just the emotions people
experience but also how they subsequently manage those emo-
tions should help us establish a more nuanced and complete
understanding of the psychological foundations of moral and
political reasoning.
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Received September 23, 2012
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Accepted May 15, 2013
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9
DISGUST REAPPRAISAL AND POLITICAL ATTITUDES
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