Rotten to the core – a neurofunctional signature of subjective core disgust generalizes to socio-moral contexts

Abstract

While disgust originates in the hard-wired mammalian distaste response, the conscious experience of disgust in humans strongly depends on subjective appraisal and may even extend to sociomoral contexts. In a series of studies, we combined functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) with machine-learning based predictive modeling to establish a comprehensive neurobiological model of subjective disgust. The neurofunctional signature accurately predicted momentary self-reported subjective disgust across discovery (n=78) and pre-registered validation (n=30) cohorts and generalized across core disgust (n=26) and sociomoral (unfair offers; n=43) contexts. Disgust experience was encoded in distributed cortical and subcortical systems, and exhibited distinct and shared neural representations with subjective fear or negative affect in interoceptive-emotional awareness and conscious appraisal systems while the signatures most accurately predicted the respective target experience. We provide an accurate fMRI-signature for disgust with a high potential to resolve ongoing evolutionary and clinical debates.