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Pathogen Disgust Does Not Predict Stigma Towards Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder
  • Ben Bond
Ben Bond
King's College London

Corresponding Author:[email protected]

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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.