Triggers of disgust

The most common universal triggers of disgust are as follows:

• Rotting or decay
• Anything coming out of the body

Everyone has the same universal triggers as we are born with them. They affect us more intensely than learned triggers. The following figure shows the different triggers of disgust:

The most common learned triggers in disgust are as follows:

• Eating insects or raw meat
• Unfamiliar religious customs
• Fans of an opposing sports team

Learned triggers can be part of your culture, or highly personal and created by your individual experiences.

Though, the five emotions we just learned are the ones that the scientific community accepts as being universal—independently of the culture—two of the pioneer researchers in the field of emotions, the psychologists Paul Ekman and Robert Plutchik, after more than four years of field research across cultures worldwide decided to add more emotions to the five universal emotions that we have covered. Paul Ekman identifies six basic emotions and Robert Plutchik eight basic emotions. Both of them use the five universal emotions as a basis for their work.

Paul Ekman understands that the core of human emotions are: joy (happiness), surprise, sadness, anger, disgust, and fear. All the other emotions radiate from these basic core universal emotions as we can see in the following figure:

Robert Plutchik′s wheel of emotions is based in eight primary emotions—joy, trust, fear, surprise, sadness, disgust, anger and anticipation—and uses a color wheel to help visualize the spectrum of emotions and how emotions relate to each other from the viewpoint of intensity, complementary emotions and contrasting emotions, as we can see in the following figure. If your figure is in greyscale and you cannot see the colors you can color the image—coloring is a very relaxing way to meditate. Choose your eight basic colors and imagine an explosion of colors going from the strong brightness in the core center and dissipating its intensity in softer tones towards the edges. It is the same with the emotions, the strong emotion at the core, dissipating intensity towards the edge.