Edwin Dalmaijer
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dalmaijer.bsky.social
Edwin Dalmaijer
@dalmaijer.bsky.social
Cognitive neuroscientist with many interests, including why our stomachs churn when we feel disgust. I also write books on programming; teach Python, statistics, and machine learning; and develop open-source software.

https://www.dalmaijer.org
Maybe you should call it “TVA” (Theory of Visceral Attention”), and suddenly the Danish audience is more likely to take notice ;)
December 2, 2025 at 9:07 AM
Interesting! Do you mean that there are two effects? 1) Placebo that reduces avoidance of disgust elicitors as participants anticipate feeling less disgust, and 2) nocebo that increases avoidance because they realise they’re not actually feeling less disgust. Would the same not apply to self-report?
November 29, 2025 at 6:14 PM
Schienle et al. gave participants a placebo but told them it was a “disgust relief”. It works well to reduce a behavioural disgust avoidance measure, but REALLY well on self-reported disgust. I interpreted that as demand effect, as it was very obvious what the expectations were on participants.
November 29, 2025 at 5:58 PM
Thank you! As you might have seen, that paragraph cited one of your papers you linked on the topic. It makes such an excellent point about validating tasks and other behavioural measures. (It also often gets cited at us by reviewers, allowing us to reiterate we DID do the work for our tasks! 😜)
November 29, 2025 at 5:51 PM
The references are all in the linked paper, but for convenience: Schienle et al. (2016), doi.org/10.1016/j.ij...
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November 29, 2025 at 4:25 PM
Whereas this review suggests gastric physiology for disgust is kind of a mess: doi.org/10.1177/2398...

(Sorry, I’ll stop spamming now! Just spend too much time triangulating these measures and got excited 😳)
Review of the gastric physiology of disgust: Proto-nausea as an under-explored facet of the gut–brain axis - Sameer N. B. Alladin, Ruth Judson, Poppy Whittaker, Angela S. Attwood, Edwin S. Dalmaijer, ...
Humans feel visceral disgust when faced with potential contaminants like bodily effluvia. The emotion serves to reject potentially contaminated food and is pair...
doi.org
November 28, 2025 at 8:34 PM
BTW, didn’t mean to imply behaviour is always better! One of cited papers actually says the opposite (often self-report more reliable than behavioural measures).

As for physiology: this recent paper shows pupil responses associate really nicely with individual self-reports: doi.org/10.1016/j.bi...
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November 28, 2025 at 8:32 PM
There’s also this excellent overview of many different disgust measures: doi.org/10.1016/j.ja... (by @tomarmstrongww.bsky.social)

Sorry, all disgust-related, but hopefully at least somewhat generalisable to other emotions :)
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November 28, 2025 at 8:28 PM
Reviewer asked something similar for a recent paper on disgust (doi.org/10.1371/jour... ), and we wrote what’s in the image. TL;DR: behaviour can be as good as self-report, and is substantially more robust against demand effects. (CC @tahnee-engelen.bsky.social and @nicolecrust.bsky.social)
November 28, 2025 at 8:25 PM
Wonderful work! Also: you people managed to get an ape paper in Nature HUMAN Behaviour?! ;)
November 24, 2025 at 12:24 PM
Absolutely! Also that fan could be layered into a Gabber track without issue; it’s a good sound ;)
November 20, 2025 at 1:12 PM
“Moederkoekje van eigen deeg” lives rent-free in my head. Also, some of the lyrics in the outro to Suryalisme will randomly pop into mind to great amusement.

Currently at In De Coupé, will keep an ear out for Beste Buurvrouw!
November 12, 2025 at 10:59 AM