The emotion disgust motivates the avoidance of pathogens and contaminants. Individuals differ in their tendency to experience disgust and this is referred to as pathogen disgust sensitivity. Yet, it remains unclear which differences in psychological processes are captured by pathogen disgust sensitivity. We tested two hypotheses about how the information processing structure underlying pathogen avoidance might give rise to individual differences in pathogen disgust sensitivity. Participants (n = 998) rated the perceived health of individuals with or without facial blemishes and indicated how comfortable they would feel about having physical contact with them. For participants with high disgust sensitivity, facial blemishes were more indicative of poor health and perceived health was more strongly related to comfort with physical contact. These findings suggest that pathogen disgust sensitivity reflects individual differences in the tendency to interpret stimuli as an infection risk and the weight given to estimated infection risk when deciding who should be approached or avoided.

情绪厌恶促使人们避免病原体和污染物。个体对厌恶的倾向不同，这被称为病原体厌恶敏感性。然而，尚不清楚病原体厌恶敏感性捕获了哪些心理过程差异。我们测试了关于避免病原体的信息处理结构如何导致病原体厌恶敏感性的个体差异的两个假设。参与者（n = 998) 对有或没有面部瑕疵的人的感知健康状况进行评估，并指出他们对与他们进行身体接触的感觉有多舒服。对于厌恶敏感度高的参与者，面部瑕疵更能表明健康状况不佳，而感知健康与身体接触的舒适度更密切相关。这些发现表明，病原体厌恶敏感性反映了将刺激解释为感染风险的倾向的个体差异，以及在决定应该接近或避免谁时对估计的感染风险的权重。