Six dimensions of sexual disgust

Sexual disgust is an emotion hypothesized to deter individuals from engaging in sexual activities that are probabilistically detrimental to fitness. Existing measures of sexual disgust are limited in treating sexual disgust as a unitary construct, potentially missing its multidimensional nature, and inadvertently ignoring important adaptive problems that this emotion evolved to solve. We conducted three studies to address these limitations. In Study 1, women and men (N = 225) nominated over 2,300 unique items that they considered sexually disgusting across a variety of different contexts. Study 2 (N = 331) identified a six-factor structure of the 50 most frequently nominated items: Taboo, Oral sex, Promiscuity, Hygiene, BDSM, and Same-sex attraction. Moreover, this study established construct validity with significant associations between sexual disgust and major dimensions of personality. Correlations between the Three Domains of Disgust Scale and our six-factor measure of sexual disgust established convergent validity. Study 3 (N = 318) confirmed the factor structure found in Study 2, established further convergent validity and examined sex differences and other individual differences in sexual disgust. Discussion focuses on the theoretical importance and psychometric validity of the Sexual Disgust Inventory–a new six-factor measure of sexual disgust.