The Scope of Disgust after Ventromedial Prefrontal Damage

Disgust is an emotion motivating withdrawal from offensive stimuli. Although individuals report disgust for rotten food (core disgust), as well as intimacy with unsavory others (interpersonal disgust), or immoral behaviors (moral disgust), it is unclear whether overlapping neural systems mediate core, interpersonal, and moral disgust. Here, we investigated whether ventromedial prefrontal cortex (VMPFC) crucially mediates disgust to core, interpersonal, and moral elicitors. VMPFC patients and healthy individuals considered vignettes, and decided whether to choose a behavioral option that elicited disgust but resulted in a material gain. Vignettes could elicit core disgust (whether to eat a pizza with some ants on it if you are starving), interpersonal disgust (whether to use the sweater of a drug addict if you are cold), moral disgust (whether to work for a corrupted politician if it will improve your career), or, for comparison purposes, anger (whether to sit beside a noisy person if that is the only free seat left). VMPFC patients were more likely than controls to choose options eliciting interpersonal and, marginally, moral disgust. In contrast, patients’ sensitivity to core disgust, as well as anger, was comparable to the controls. These findings indicate that VMPFC mediates interpersonal and moral, but not core, disgust.