Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 1994, Vol. 66, No. 5,870-881 Copyright 1994 by the American Psychological Association Inc 0022-3514/94/S3.00 Varieties of Disgust Faces and the Structure of Disgust Paul Rozin, Laura Lowery, and Rhonda Ebert In 3 facial expression identification studies, college students matched a variety of disgust faces to verbally described eliciting situations. The faces depicted specific muscle action movements in ac- cordance with P. Ekman and W. V. Friesen's (1978) Facial Action Coding System. The nose wrinkle is associated with either irritating or offensive smells and, to some extent, bad tastes. Gape and tongue extrusion are associated primarily with what we call core orfood-offense disgust and also oral irritation. The broader range of disgust elicitors, including stimuli that remind humans of their animal origins (e.g., body boundary violations, inappropriate sex, poor hygiene, and death), a variety of aversive interpersonal contacts, and certain moral offenses are associated primarily with the raised upper lip. The results support a theory of disgust that posits its origin as a response to bad tastes and maps its evolution onto a moral emotion. Since the writings of Darwin (1872/1965), facial expression has been at the core of the description of the emotions. The idea of fundamental, universal emotions is supported by some cross- cultural invariance in the assignment of certain faces to specific emotions (Ekman, 1971, 1989; Izard, 1971). The focus of re- search on facial expression in recent decades has been docu- mentation of the linkage between prototypical faces and emo- tions. A second aim has been to achieve a level of greater com- plexity by examining faces that show elements of more than one fundamental emotion. Researchers have devoted surprisingly little attention to looking at the variations within faces associ- ated with one fundamental emotion with the aim of under- standing the structure of elicitors of that emotion. The expressive component of disgust has been studied almost entirely with reference to the face. The features of the prototyp- ical disgust face have been described by Darwin (1872/1965), Izard (1971), and Ekman (Ekman, 1971; Ekman & Friesen, 1975). All agree that a set of facial movements around the mouth and nose are central to disgust, but there is not a com- plete consensus on the precise set of movements. Darwin em- phasized the gape (Ekman & Friesen's [1978] Facial Action Coding System [FACS] Action Unit [AU] 26) but also referred to retraction of the upper lip (AU 10) and, to some extent, the nose wrinkle (AU 9), dropping of the mouth corners (AU 15), and various other movements. Izard (1971) also focused on the gape and the upper lip retraction, along with some additional movements, whereas Ekman and Friesen (1975) focused on up- per lip retraction and nose wrinkle along with a raising of the chin(AU 17). Darwin (1872/1965) wrote, "As the sensation of disgust pri- marily arises in connection with the act of eating and tasting, it Paul Rozin, Laura Lowery, and Rhonda Ebert, Department of Psy- chology, University of Pennsylvania. The research reported in this article was supported by a grant from the Whitehall Foundation. We thank Paul Ekman for advice and for assistance in the preparation and FACS scoring of the face stimuli. Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Paul Rozin, Department of Psychology, University of Pennsylvania, 3815 Walnut Street, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-6196. is natural that its expression should consist chiefly in move- ments around the mouth" (p. 257). The gape (and tongue ex- tension) has obvious functional significance in expelling mouth contents, and the nose wrinkle may function to retard inhala- tion of odors. The upper lip raise may have a weaker retarding effect on odor inhalation, or it may have no functional signifi- cance with respect to oronasal rejection. The list of fundamental emotions has varied somewhat over the last 100 years, but it usually has included 6-10 emotions and, from Darwin onward, has always included disgust. Disgust seems to have had a unique cultural evolutionary trajectory, which has been mapped out by Rozin, Haidt, and McCauley (1993). It seems to originate in the "distaste" facial response of infants to bitter tastes. Later it becomes (both in development and, we believe, cultural evolution) more an indication of revul- sion at the prospect of oral incorporation of an offensive sub- stance (Angyal, 1941; Rozin & Fallon, 1987). At this point, it is an ideational form of food rejection and is conceptually separable from the response to bad tastes (Rozin & Fallon, 1987; Rozin et al., 1993). The most potent elicitors of core disgust are body waste products (Angyal, 1941) and ani- mals and their products, when considered primarily as potential foods. The domain of disgust expands, so that for adults in many cultures it is involved with violation of body borders at points other than the mouth and has clear links to sex, gore, poor hygiene, and death (Haidt, McCauley, & Rozin, in press; Rozin et al., 1993). These latter linkages, when added to the excretory and ingestive foci of core disgust, are all indicators of animal functions. We have suggested that, at a second level of elaboration be- yond core disgust, disgust reflects the human concern to be dis- tinguished from other animals or to not be considered as an animal at all (Haidt et al., in press; Rozin & Fallon, 1987; Rozin et al., 1993). What we call animal-origin disgust reflects a rejec- tion of any suggestion that humans are animals. The desire not to be considered an animal may itself have as its root a concern with death, an animal property shared by humans that is par- ticularly unsettling and one that we try to put out of our minds (Becker, 1973; Haidt et al., in press; Rozin et al., 1993). We have identified two possible further expansions of disgust, which do not have a close conceptual relation to either core or 870