Disentangling the Emotional Experience of Grima

Abstract

Although almost everybody has experienced the unpleasant sensation evoked by hearing a scratch on a board or plate, surprisingly little research has been devoted to it. Whereas this emotional experience is known in Spanish as grima, it is typically labeled as disgust by English and German speakers. We hypothesized that grima and disgust would differ with respect to their constitutive features and thus analyzed the degree of differentiation between the two aversive experiences. Across two studies using a forced-choice questionnaire and an open-ended questionnaire, both grima and the Spanish concept of disgust (i.e., asco) were characterized as unpleasant sensations, which involve rejection action tendencies on a behavioral level. Importantly, results revealed that both can be clearly delimitated in terms of their properties in the experiential, expressive, and physiological domain. Thus, the present research suggests that, even though English and German speakers assimilate grima to disgust, both grima and disgust are conceptually different experiences.