try these foods. Research suggests that high sensation-seeking peo-
ple have lower disgust reactions than those with average or low
sensation-seeking personalities. Low sensation-seekers are more
easily disgusted by foods they aren’t used to. This makes it more
likely that a high sensation-seeking individual will try something
unusual, like goat brains or whole saute ́ed baby octopus or even
chicken hearts.
Cy, a food blogger who writes about his experiences with
unusual food, is a perfect example. “Let’s see,” he began, “I’ve had
fish eyes. I’ve had bull testicles, but those were a delicacy in Spain.
Chicken hearts was another one. I remember when I ordered
chicken hearts, I got a lot of weird looks and nobody wanted to
try my dish.”
“That must happen a lot.”
“Yeah. When they were put in front of me, they didn’t look
very appetizing. It was a whole pile of tiny-tiny hearts – like big pea-
nuts or something – sitting in this stew. When I looked at the dish,
I was like, ‘Oh shit, this is a bad idea,’ but I didn’t say anything, because
I didn’t want to admit that this might have been a bad call in front of
the other people who had already given me some flack for ordering
chicken hearts. Then I took a bite. It was kind of gross at first, and then
it started to grow on me. So I ended up finishing the dish.”
“Did you feel disgusted at all?” I asked.
“Ah...” there was a long pause. “No...OnceItookthe
first few bites, it was alright. It was actually pretty tasty.” It
sounded like he never even considered that he could have been
disgusted by it.
Xavier Caseras and his colleagues discovered that people
with a more reactive behavioral inhibition system had a greater
reaction to things they found disgusting. Since high sensation-
seekers have underactive behavioral inhibition systems, it might
mean that they are less likely to experience disgust and emesis
(nausea) reaction than their low sensation-seeking friends.^31
Another researcher decided to test how low disgust might
be linked to sensation-seeking. David Dvorak and his colleagues at
the University of South Dakota conducted an experiment to find
out, and the way they did it might cause emesis in you. The
researchers found a video on YouTube that showed two adults
vomiting on each other and then eating each other’s vomit. They
figured that this might produce feelings of disgust (the description
alone did for me). High sensation-seekers found the videos less62 / Buzz!Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Access paid by the UCSF Library, on 11 Nov 2019 at 14:18:13, subject to the Cambridge