Dataset Information

Disgust sensitivity in early pregnancy as a response to high pathogen risk.

ABSTRACT:

Introduction

Considered a part of the behavioral immune system (BIS), disgust sensitivity is expected to be adjusting as a response to the actual level of the environmental health risks.

Methods

In this preregistered study, we tested the hypothesis that disgust sensitivity would be higher during the COVID-19 pandemic compared to the pre-pandemic period in pregnant women. In this between-subject study with a longitudinal trend design, we administered the Disgust Scale-Revised to 200 pregnant women before the pandemic and to 350 pregnant women during the pandemic.

Results

We found a small but significant effect of the pandemic on disgust sensitivity, such that higher disgust sensitivity was found in women pregnant during the pandemic. This effect was stronger in primiparae, however, the interaction between parity and the pandemic period was not significant. Disgust sensitivity decreased with age. No differences in terms of nausea and vomiting were found between the women pregnant before and during the pandemic.

Discussion

Our findings indicate that although BIS is presumed to function as a complex mechanism to prevent health-threatening behaviors, its activation in pregnant women during the COVID-19 pandemic is rather weak.

SUBMITTER: Kankova S

PROVIDER: S-EPMC10009253 | biostudies-literature | 2023

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

ACCESS DATA

Publications

Disgust sensitivity in early pregnancy as a response to high pathogen risk.

Kaňková Šárka Š Takács Lea L Hlaváčová Jana J Calda Pavel P Monk Catherine C Havlíček Jan J

Frontiers in psychology 20230227

<h4>Introduction</h4>Considered a part of the behavioral immune system (BIS), disgust sensitivity is expected to be adjusting as a response to the actual level of the environmental health risks.<h4>Methods</h4>In this preregistered study, we tested the hypothesis that disgust sensitivity would be higher during the COVID-19 pandemic compared to the pre-pandemic period in pregnant women. In this between-subject study with a longitudinal trend design, we administered the Disgust Scale-Revised to 20 ...[more]

PMID: 36923149

Similar Datasets

Project description:The behavioral immune system posits that disgust functions to protect animals from pathogen exposure. Therefore, cues of pathogen risk should be a primary driver influencing variation in disgust. Yet, to our knowledge, neither the relationship between current pathogen risk and disgust, nor the correlation between objective and perceived pathogen risk have been addressed using ecologically valid measures in a global sample. The current article reports two studies addressing these gaps. In Study 1, we include a global sample (n = 361) and tested the influence of both perceived pathogen exposure and an objective measure of pathogen risk-local communicable infectious disease mortality rates-on individual differences in pathogen and sexual disgust sensitivities. In Study 2, we first replicate Study 1's analyses in another large sample (n = 821), targeting four countries (US, Italy, Brazil, and India); we then replaced objective and perceived pathogen risk with variables specific to the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic. In Study 1, both local infection mortality rates and perceived infection exposure predicted unique variance in pathogen and sexual disgust. In Study 2, we found that perceived infection exposure positively predicted sexual disgust, as predicted. When substituting perceived and objective SARS-CoV-2 risk in our models, perceived risk of contracting SARS-CoV-2 positively predicted pathogen and sexual disgust, and state case rates negatively predicted pathogen disgust. Further, in both studies, objective measures of risk (i.e., local infection mortality and SARS-CoV-2 rates) positively correlated with subjective measures of risk (i.e., perceived infection exposure and perceived SARS-CoV-2 risk). Ultimately, these results provide two pieces of foundational evidence for the behavioral immune system: 1) perceptions of pathogen risk accurately assay local, objective mortality risk across countries, and 2) both perceived and objective pathogen risk explain variance in disgust levels.

Dataset Information

Disgust sensitivity in early pregnancy as a response to high pathogen risk.

Introduction

Methods

Results

Discussion

Publications

Disgust sensitivity in early pregnancy as a response to high pathogen risk.

Similar Datasets

OmicsDI is part of the ELIXIR infrastructure

Tweets