Findings highlight safety, policing, wellness and resources
February 26, 2021 SHARE
A newly released report provides insight into public safety at Washington University in St. Louis, with a focus on exploring how the university can best support safety on and near the Danforth Campus to meet the needs of its diverse community. The report was completed this month by the university’s Public Safety Committee, which Henry S. Webber, executive vice chancellor for civic affairs and strategic planning, convened last fall.
The committee, which comprised Washington University students, faculty, staff and alumni, was co-chaired by Gerald Early, the Merle Kling Professor of Modern Letters, professor of English and chair of African and African American studies, and Stephanie Kurtzman, the Peter G. Sortino Director of the Gephardt Institute for Civic and Community Engagement. Click here to read the full report.
Examples might include your stomach turning at the smell of spoiled food or the sight of feces.
The new study in the
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences investigates whether people who experience a greater pathogen disgust sensitivity that is, people who are more sensitive to feeling disgust will become exposed to fewer pathogens in their local environments, and thus suffer fewer infections, explains coauthor Theresa E. Gildner, assistant professor of biological anthropology at Washington University in St. Louis.
Exposure to pathogens
Researchers tested whether a self-reported individual level of disgust in response to likely sources of infection was associated with signs of infection in three Indigenous Ecuadorian Shuar communities. The communities were all located in high-pathogen environments, but with differing levels of economic development and participation in activities such as hunting.
Date Time
Researchers show how disgust evolved as an emotion
Next time a refrigerator door opens to the smell of rotting uncooked chicken, consider the moment as an odorous encounter with the origin of disgust. That repulsion is linked to an evolved human emotion that helps avoid exposure to something sickening.
In a project that blended anthropology, biology and psychology, a University of Oregon team explored disgust by studying how Ecuador’s indigenous Shuar people, living in communities with differing levels of market integration, respond to revolting things.
The research was detailed in a paper published online Feb. 23 ahead of print in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Writing nearly 2,000 years ago, the Roman philosopher Seneca described anger as “fundamentally wicked” and fit only for suppression. The doctrinal texts of Christianity, Judaism, and Islam tend to take a similarly dim view of anger, which they often list among man’s principal shortcomings.
“Traditionally, anger has been looked at as negative,” says Philip Gable, PhD, an associate professor of psychological and brain sciences at the University of Delaware.
Gable has studied the way anger influences the brain and behavior. He says that, by and large, people report that the experience of being angry is unpleasant at least in retrospect. Of course, anger is also an emotion that fuels aggression, rage, violence, and hate. For all these reasons, most psychologists today categorize anger as a negative emotion.
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