DISGUST as a primary emotional system and its clinical relevance

Dr Alexey Tolchinsky, PsyD

Saturday, 16 November
11 a.m. (EST- Eastern USA)

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This webinar will be approximately two hours long.

We propose to consider DISGUST as a primary emotional system within Affective Neuroscience, which has the potential to improve the efficacy of psychotherapy with obsessive-compulsive disorder, hypochondriasis, and emetophobia. In 2007, Judith Toronchuk and George Ellis provided comprehensive evidence that DISGUST system, as they defined it, matched all Jaak Panksepp’s criteria for a primary emotional system. A debate ensued and was not unambiguously resolved. It is useful to note that Jaak Panksepp and his colleagues did not have a chance to test disgust experimentally in rats, since rats are non-emetic species (they do not retch or vomit). We would like to resume this discussion and consider the data that accumulated since 2007, including the new experimental designs finally allowing us to conduct optogenetics-based research on DISGUST in mice. We will also provide data on DISGUST’s close relationship with the immune system in humans, particularly in pregnancy, the neuroanatomy of DISGUST, and the role of DISGUST dysregulation in psychopathology. In addition, we will share inferences on the evolutionary origins of DISGUST going back to single cell organisms, which allows us to contextualize the differences between DISGUST and FEAR. We hope that a renewed research and clinical interest in DISGUST has the potential to further improve the efficacy of psychotherapy with hard-to-treat conditions, such as OCD with contamination obsessions/washing compulsions, eating disorders, hypochondriasis, and emetophobia.

Full text of the peer-reviewed paper:
Tolchinsky, et al. (2024): Please click here to access this paper.

Bio
Alexey Tolchinsky is a clinical psychologist in private practice in Maryland, USA. He is a Clinical Fellow of NPSA. His research interest includes the application of non-linear dynamical systems to the theories of consciousness and psychopathology, as well as active inference, narrative fallacy, trauma, dissociative experiences, and OCD. A common theme in these papers is a highlight of how the natural limitations of our theoretical models influence the clinical practice. For example, a historical bias toward determinism in psychiatry and clinical psychology, the natural limitations of various classification systems, the limitations of our working memory – all influence how we conceptualize psychopathology and treat our patients in psychotherapy.

CPD credits: 2
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