How Well do You Understand Your Yuk Factor?

[herbivore12]

Quite pedestrian stuff to add, but:

1. Vomit. Anyone's/-thing's. If I have to clean some up, I have to take a giant wad of paper towels -- like, it looks like I'm holding a pillow, by the time I'm done -- and go at the pile with my face turned away. And hope to god I don't feel the squishiness, or any warm fluid seeping through . . . (Why do I feel this way? I dunno. Because I associate vomit with sickness and disease? And because the stuff looks and smells just horrid?)

2. Human poo (I mean the kind that comes from humans, not the kind produced after eating humans). Other poo doesn't bother me much, but seeing a human poo sitting there in a public toilet, or (especially) baby poo in a diaper really gets me. Another reason it's good that I don't have kids. (Why? Again, stink and icky texture, I guess (of the poo, not of children). Plus whatever strange irrational stuff is wrapped up, so to speak, in poo.)

3. Once I got a terrible case of food poisoning after eating at a Chinese place. For about two years thereafter, if anyone even mentioned Chinese food, I'd begin to feel ill. I'm better now, thankfully, but it took time. I now know this to be an example of the phenomenon called "bait shyness", and it seems pretty sensible (sorta). Something makes you sick, you become viscerally averse to it. Survival mechanism, of sorts.

It's funny, because I had just been discussing similar stuff with a friend who's now in vet school. She's doing a lot of work in animal behavior, and there are lots of cases where animals become averse to a particular thing that they associate with something bad (pain, fear, illness) even if that thing had nothing to do with the bad feeling. So, a loud noise startles a bird very badly, and that bird's keeper happened to be wearing a red shirt when it happened. From then on, the bird flips out whenever its keeper is wearing red. That sort of thing.

Seems perfectly plausible that the same irrational links probably happen in people, too, even beyond infancy. Say you catch your wife kissing some other guy during a company party on a chartered boat. Maybe from then on you don't so much want to go on boats, especially if that basmati Ray is on board, too, the hypocritical jerk.

(Just kidding at the end there, but the point is that we seem, at least in part, to be wired to avoid things we associate with unpleasantness -- physical or emotional or psychological or in combination -- even if the things we're avoiding aren't directly responsible for the bad feelings. Which is understandable, but kind of weird.)

[Innocent Bystander]

HERE
is the BBC's Scientific Yukky Test.

Just to add - my wife has a phobia about hair. I have to pull the stuff out of the plugs, lift clumps from the bed or the carpet, and I really ought to trim my beard.

My Dear Old Mother had a phobia about missing limbs. She kept a drapers shop, and one day a one-armed customer asked my Mother to help her on with one glove, to try the size. Mother very nearly tossed her cookies. I think she managed to keep things down until the customer was out of the shop.

[Redwolf]

It always amazes me how our bodies interpret things that they associate with sickness. I've had many a beloved food ruined for me for years because it happened to be my last meal before a major stomach upset (even if it wasn't the cause of the upset). One of the saddest for me was Arab food...specifically felafel with hummus and nutted rice pilaf. That's always been a huge fave of mine, but about eight years ago, I had it for dinner and that night came down with a horrible stomach virus. It's only been in the past year that I've been able to eat felafel again (a major hardship, because it's not only a favorite of mine, but of my husband as well).

Redwolf

[missy]

1. Bananas...no matter how hard I try to like them, they make me gag and wretch every time I even smell one. Really gross

while they don't make me gag - I do NOT like bananas. I always said it was doing my "motherly penance" when I would mash up a banana for one of the boys when they were just starting solid foods.

[flanum]

The smell of deoderant "masking" stale sweat! Id rather just get the smell of the sweat, i find the "masking" effect stifling!

Toenails (after being cut off).

Baked beans(smell, taste, texture, everything!)!

I dont mind cadavers, vomit, poo, roadkill, snot or any of the normal stuff (unless im hideously hungover)!

[Wombat]

Just for clarification, Wombat, are we narrowing this down to "gross", and not taking into general account anything that makes us uncomfortable?

Judging from the thread's title, I'm assuming so.

Gross was what I had in mind but serious discomfort would still be interesting. It might turn out to be continuous with gross. Or not. If it makes for an interesting story, tell us.

Nice to see that Herbivore12 has already got started with the explanation. I'm pretty busy with my work and I might not have any work left to do when I finally get around to trying to make sense of all this stuff. By far the hardest to understand are the purely symbolic cases.

[emmline]

I could not tolerate Ouzo or anything similar for years because of a classic collegiate episode involving it.

[jsluder]

Cheez-its. Yuk. Five-year-old kid, big box of Cheez-its, moving vehicle... Can't stand Cheez-its to this day.

[Nanohedron]

Just for clarification, Wombat, are we narrowing this down to "gross", and not taking into general account anything that makes us uncomfortable?

Judging from the thread's title, I'm assuming so.

Gross was what I had in mind but serious discomfort would still be interesting. It might turn out to be continuous with gross. Or not. If it makes for an interesting story, tell us.

Nice to see that Herbivore12 has already got started with the explanation. I'm pretty busy with my work and I might not have any work left to do when I finally get around to trying to make sense of all this stuff. By far the hardest to understand are the purely symbolic cases.

The reason I ask is that I have very strong negative reactions to some human situations, especially in dramatic presentation. Aside from depictions of violence, for example, certain personality types make me very ill at ease: the character of Barney Fife from the different "Mayberry" series comes to mind. I suppose you could say that the nebbish, the shlemiel and the shlemazl hit close to home. It's a twofold thing: it's as if I'm watching what I fear to be in actuality, and witnessing the mishaps of an unfortunate that I would rather not gawk at. But my suspicion is that this sort of thing might deserve its own separate scrutiny, even if as a subset to "Yuck Factor".

You better not charge me for this. Besides, there's no couch.

[izzarina]

I have one more.....in that link that IB posted, the picture of the maggot infested teeth rated exceptionally high on my yuck meter. I almost hurled just looking at it

[Jack]

Nothing grosses me out actually. That's why I accidentally gross people out and don't mean to. I especially love looking at dead animals, even though I find it sad. It's so fascinating to see, and this includes butchered pigs who are going to be turned into Tyler Morris' dinner. It's a horribly sad thing to see but the way the bones connect and stuff is so cool, I think. I find dead birds all the time and look them over and take pictures if I have my camera with me.

[SteveShaw]

* Greasy hair. (Usually unnecessary. Horrible)

Hmm.. Going from your avatar, I'll be kind and put this one down to jealousy.

[SteveShaw]

Apple sauce. Sour, sloppy vomit.

[Lambchop]

Speaking about the countryside, although I spend a lot of my days off out and about taking pictures, I would never get closer than ten yards to anything that lives on a farm. Horses, cattle,sheep .

[Nanohedron]

Speaking about the countryside, although I spend a lot of my days off out and about taking pictures, I would never get closer than ten yards to anything that lives on a farm. Horses, cattle,sheep .

How about CHICKENS?