I registered this book at BookCrossing.com!
http://www.BookCrossing.com/journal/13410067

I have long felt that disgust is an emotion that we can control. We can decide whether or not to be disgusted by something. In this book, Herz makes this point repeatedly, and notes that it is actually a luxury, a feeling the entitled among us may choose. People of little privilege don't have the option of feeling disgusted by insects, by strange foods, by certain smells, for example. Sometimes we just have to live with some things and it is better to make peace with the fact.

I have found this subject interesting for a long time, although this is the first time I have done any real reading on it. A few years ago I read a book by a woman who was thrown in prison for her political beliefs, and who was faced with cockroaches the first night. She simply got used to them. Obviously, no other course of action would be helpful in that situation. I admit that I tend to hold in low esteem those who cringe and make faces when they see a bug. I am not faultless in this regard, as I will jump when a wild mouse runs into a room or when a spider lands on me . I recognize, though, that this is on me. My choice.

Herz's book explores a number of aspects to disgust, including the type of disgust some feel for persons who do not adhere to their own concept of a moral code. For example, those who find homosexuality "disgusting". She traces this to brain behavior, though, and finds that this type disgust is not the same as that we experience when we encounter a pile of poop.

Her exploration delves into horror movies, germs, people, love and lust, and tries to find evolutionary reasons for our feelings as well as reasons some people love horror on the screen and others can't abide it, for example.

It is an engaging book, written clearly and simply and with some humor. I wasn't as entranced by her humor as others have been but can't fault her for trying. ( )

Psychologist Rachel Herz presents a detailed exploration of the emotion of disgust: what happens in our brains and bodies when something repulses us, the extent to which disgust is cultural or innate, what kinds of things most commonly disgust us and why, and what implications our capacity for disgust and the ways it can be triggered might have for individuals and society.

I have somewhat mixed feelings about this book. The topic is a deeply interesting one, and Herz raises all kinds of really thought-provoking questions about our reactions, both rational and irrational, to things that make us go, "Yuck!" And some of the specifics she gets into are absolutely fascinating. For instance, I was surprised to discover that disgust is something that needs to be learned; it doesn't show up in very small children. Which, now that I think about it, probably explains quite a few things about very small children. It also makes perfect sense; which of the things we encounter are wholesome and which are dangerous is something that's going to vary a lot in different places and circumstances, so it's actually quite useful if our instincts about what to avoid and what to approach are programmable, so to speak, rather than hard-wired.

Unfortunately, though, I think this book is flawed, as a lot of books of this nature are, in that the author seems to let her conclusions get ahead of the actual science. For example, she asserts some rather simplistic evolutionary explanations for some rather complex phenomena without necessarily backing them up very well. She also, rather surprisingly, mixes in a fair bit of Freudian psychology, which isn't particularly scientific at all. So it seems to me to be a good idea to take most of her more sweeping and general statements with a fairly large grain of salt.

Also, a warning: Being as it's about the nature of disgust, this book necessarily talks about a lot of truly disgusting things. I really do not recommend reading it while eating. Especially if, like me, you rank a bit high on the "easily disgusted scale." (You can assess your own disgust-level ranking with a handily provided quiz early in the book.) ( )

A fascinating and frequently entertaining look at the factors, both cultural and instinctual, that trigger the complex human emotion of disgust. ( )

I gave up on this book on the page where the author first explains that disgust is the emotion that separates normal people from Jeffrey Dahmer and then goes on to state that Asians are worse at recognizing disgust than Europeans. Nice. ( )