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In the present study, the hypothesized causal relationship between disgust and eating pathology was investigated. Female undergraduates were either assigned to an experimental condition in which feelings of disgust were induced by means of a bad smelling odorant, or to a control condition in which no such disgust manipulation was carried out. Both groups completed questionnaires for measuring various eating disorder-related concepts (i.e., body esteem, restraint eating, and body change strategies). In addition, explicit and implicit preferences for high-caloric food were measured. Results demonstrated that women in the experimental condition did not report lower levels of body esteem, and neither showed higher levels of restraint eating or other body change strategies. Furthermore, they did not display a decreased explicit or implicit preference for high-caloric food. Thus, in the present study no indication for a causal relation between disgust and eating disorder symptoms in young females was found.

Various studies have suggested a relationship between disgust and eating disorders. For example, disgust sensitivity is found to be correlated to eating disorder symptoms (Davey, Buckland, Tantow, & Dallos, 1998), and eating disordered patients are found to be more disgusted by disgust-relevant stimuli than healthy control women (Troop, Treasure, & Serpell, 2002). However, there are also studies which found no relation between disgust (sensitivity) and eating pathology (e.g., Muris et al., 2000). Apart from these inconsistencies in results, no study has directly examined the causal relationship between disgust and eating pathology. Therefore, the present study attempted to induce feelings of disgust in the lab by means of an odor manipulation, and investigated whether this would evoke decreased levels of body esteem and increased levels of eating disorder symptoms. Not only self-report questionnaires and an explicit food preference task were employed as dependent variables, but we also included an Implicit Association Test (IAT; Greenwald, McGhee, & Schwartz, 1998), which provides an index of the strength of automatic associations between concepts. It was hypothesized that the experimental disgust manipulation would result in lower body esteem, and higher levels of restraint eating behavior and other body change strategies than a control condition. Furthermore, it was expected that experimentally induced disgust would yield less explicit appetite for high-caloric food, and a stronger implicit association between high-caloric food and negative stimuli.