Séminaire Équipe Anthropologie Evolutive – Cécile Sarabian / Disease risk perception, disgust and their applications

Risk perception – or an individual’s susceptibility to perceive a threat (e.g. disease, predator, competitor) – has shaped the physiology, cognition, behavior and ecology of animals for millions of years. While a lot of research has focused on lethal threats (i.e. predation), only recently have we increased our understanding of how animals, and more particularly our closest phylogenetic relatives, detect disease risk and prevent infection. Disgust, an adaptive system based in neural tissue, is identified as a trigger for such behavioural immunity in vertebrates, evolving to protect hosts from disease. Through a series of experimental studies, we asked: 1) What triggers avoidance in non-human primates (NHPs)? 2) Does disgust procure health benefits? 3) Is disgust learnt in NHPs? 4) Are there disgust cognitive markers? And 5) What are the potential applications of disgust? We found that: (1) NHPs exhibit aversion and avoid sensory cues associated with biological contaminants and the risk of infection; (2) individuals who avoid contaminated food show lower levels of infection compared to less cautious individuals; (3) disgust is partly learnt to interact with physiological immunity; and (4) risk perception affects cognitive processes in primates, in different ways depending on the type of risk (infection vs. predation). Finally (5), although disease risk avoidance and disgust are used in public health and consumer choice, disgust can have a wider range of applications, such as in wildlife management, conservation and animal welfare. Building on my previous work and the resulting theoretical framework, some of my ongoing and future projects aim to exploit the protective phenotypes of animals and humans to reduce the frequency of negative interactions between them. I introduce some of these contexts in which disgust-related avoidance behaviors could be applied and discuss some of the associated challenges.