Abstract
It has been suggested that both the avoidance of individuals with
infectious diseases and stigmatisation of others are driven by the
emotion disgust. Previous research lends credence to this hypothesis,
however, whether disease avoidance and disgust play a role in stigma
towards those with mental disorders remains unclear. To test this, the
present study examined whether pathogen disgust scores on the Three
Domain Disgust Scale were associated with stigmatising attitudes towards
those with four different presentations of obsessive-compulsive disorder
(n=70). Moral disgust and sexual disgust were also incorporated as
exploratory variables. Our results indicated that neither pathogen
disgust, moral disgust nor sexual disgust scores could predict stigma
towards any of the obsessive-compulsive disorder presentations,
suggesting that variation in disgust may be unable to completely explain
individual differences in stigma towards obsessive-compulsive disorder.