The role of disgust in blood-injection-injury phobia examined through the use of implicit association tests

The current study examined the role of fear and disgust among participants with BII phobia by measuring each emotion through implicit associations, specifically an Implicit Association Test (IAT) created by the researcher. Participants were administered the Mutilation Questionnaire (MQ), in order to sort them into phobic and non-phobic (NP) groups, and the Disgust Scale (DS) to measure their disgust sensitivity. From the IAT, reaction time results indicated that BII phobics were approaching significance as being faster at responding to matched pairs of mutilation-disgust than mutilation-afraid (t(23)=2.02, p=.055), which was that mutilation images would be more closely associated with the emotion of disgust rather than fear for BII phobics. NPs, although faster responders than BII phobics overall, did not demonstrate a significant difference between matched pairs of disgusting-mutilation and afraid-mutilation, indicating that NPs do not associate either disgust or fear with mutilation more closely.