Attachment and Attentional Biases for Facial Expressions of Disgust

Research on biological and psychological functions of disgust is increasing, yet relatively little is known about how people react to facial displays of disgust. This study used the dot probe task to examine attachment-related biases for emotional faces. Anxiously-attached individuals exhibited a significant tendency both to attend away from closed-mouth disgust faces, which have been associated with social rejection (social-moral disgust), and to attend toward open-mouth disgust faces, which are associated with visceral or core disgust. Consistent with theoretical proposals that there are two distinct sub-types of disgust, we propose that attentional avoidance of closed-mouth disgust faces represents an emotion-regulatory response to perceived social threat among individuals high in attachment anxiety. Future research examining attentional biases to disgust in clinical populations may shed light on interpersonal functions of disgust in psychopathology.