A neurofunctional signature of subjective disgust generalizes to oral distaste and socio-moral contexts

Abstract

<p>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 socio-moral contexts. Here, in a series of studies, we combined functional magnetic resonance imaging with machine-learning-based predictive modelling to establish a comprehensive neurobiological model of subjective disgust. The developed neurofunctional signature accurately predicted momentary self-reported subjective disgust across discovery (<em>n</em> = 78) and pre-registered validation (<em>n</em> = 30) cohorts and generalized across core disgust (<em>n</em> = 34 and <em>n</em> = 26), gustatory distaste (<em>n</em> = 30) and socio-moral (unfair offers; <em>n</em> = 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 functional magnetic resonance imaging signature for disgust with a high potential to resolve ongoing evolutionary debates.<br></p>