The Three-Domain Disgust Scale, originally developed to capture the idea that disgust is not a single dial but three, distinguishes pathogen disgust, sexual disgust, and moral disgust. Pathogen disgust is the familiar protective reaction to contamination cues such as spoiled food, bodily waste, or visible infection. Sexual disgust is thought to regulate choices of mates and sexual behavior, steering people away from biologically costly or socially inappropriate partners and acts. Moral disgust, by contrast, extends the same visceral rejection to violations of social and ethical norms, from dishonesty to cruelty. The theory behind the scale predicts that these three domains, while related, should behave as separable psychological systems with different correlates, and testing that prediction rigorously in a new language and culture is exactly what the Ghent team set out to do.

The study’s design gives it unusual statistical muscle. In a first study of 991 participants and a second, larger study of 1,806, the researchers subjected the Dutch TDDS to confirmatory factor analysis, a technique that tests whether the pattern of answers people give matches a theoretically specified structure rather than emerging haphazardly. Across both samples, the analyses supported the theorized three-factor solution, with items loading on their intended domain and with acceptable global fit indices. In plain terms, when Dutch-speaking respondents answered questions about moldy food, unusual sexual practices, and morally repugnant behavior, their responses clustered into three coherent and largely independent dimensions, just as the three-domain framework predicts.

That structural result matters, but it is only the first hurdle. A scale could produce three neat factors and still measure something different for men than for women, which would make any comparison between the sexes meaningless. To rule this out, the authors tested measurement invariance, a demanding psychometric requirement that the scale’s items relate to the underlying disgust constructs in the same way across groups. In the second study, invariance across sex was fully supported at every level tested, and in the first study it was approximately supported. This means that when a man and a woman receive different scores on the Dutch TDDS, the difference can be interpreted as a genuine difference in disgust sensitivity rather than an artifact of the instrument functioning differently for each group.

With that foundation in place, the study turned to one of the most debated questions in disgust research: do men and women actually differ? The answer, in this dataset, is nuanced. Women showed reliably higher latent levels of sexual disgust, a difference that emerged consistently across both samples once measurement was held constant. By contrast, sex differences in pathogen disgust and moral disgust were smaller and depended on the sample, appearing in one dataset but not robustly in the other. The pattern fits evolutionary accounts that place particular emphasis on sexual disgust as a mechanism shaped differently in the two sexes, while cautioning against sweeping claims of broad female superiority in disgust sensitivity. The largest and most consistent sex difference is domain-specific, not global.

Perhaps the most scientifically consequential part of the paper is its examination of what the three disgust domains actually predict. The researchers examined associations with constructs including pair bonding, a measure labeled Low Morality reflecting self-reported immoral tendencies, and Outgroup Avoidance, reflecting avoidance of people from other groups. The results were strikingly selective. Sexual disgust was robustly linked to pair bonding across both studies, consistent with the idea that people high in sexual disgust invest differently in committed relationships and hold stricter boundaries around sexual behavior. Moral disgust, meanwhile, was substantially and negatively associated with Low Morality: individuals who report more immoral tendencies score lower in moral disgust, exactly the inverse relationship theory would anticipate if moral disgust functions as an internal guardian against norm violations.

Pathogen disgust told a different and more complicated story. Rather than relating broadly to everything, it showed selective associations, including a consistent positive link with Low Morality and weaker, sample-dependent relations with Outgroup Avoidance. The connection between contamination sensitivity and intergroup avoidance is a flashpoint in the literature, with some theorists arguing that pathogen disgust evolved partly to keep people away from unfamiliar others who might carry novel diseases, and others warning that such claims overreach. The Dutch data lend cautious support to the middle ground: the association exists but is not stable enough across samples to be treated as a firm psychological law, and the authors’ decision to report it as sample-dependent is a model of restraint in a field where dramatic claims about disgust and prejudice often outrun the evidence.

The study also distinguishes between construct validity and criterion validity, a distinction that matters for anyone hoping to use the scale in applied research. Construct validity, the coherence of the scale’s associations with theoretically related variables, was well supported. Criterion validity, the ability of disgust domains to predict external outcomes, was only partly supported. Predictors of Low Morality were stable across the two studies, but predictions of Outgroup Avoidance were less consistent, varying between samples. For researchers, the practical implication is that the Dutch TDDS can be trusted as a measurement tool and used confidently in studies of moral and sexual behavior, while findings involving intergroup outcomes should be replicated before being treated as established.

Why should a psychometric validation of a questionnaire generate wider interest? Because disgust has become one of the most influential constructs in modern moral and political psychology. Disgust sensitivity has been linked in hundreds of studies to political conservatism, moral judgment, prejudice, hygiene behavior, and even responses to pandemics. Many of those findings rest on translated versions of scales whose measurement properties in the new language were never verified as thoroughly as they were in the original. The Dutch TDDS now provides Dutch-speaking researchers, a community that includes large research programs in the Netherlands and Flanders, with an instrument whose three-factor structure, sex invariance, and nomological network have been demonstrated in samples large enough to detect even modest effects. That is the kind of unglamorous groundwork on which entire literatures depend.

The paper also illustrates a broader methodological trend: the insistence on replicating psychometric findings across independent samples within a single publication. A single-sample validation can always be dismissed as a quirk of who happened to answer the survey. By showing that the three-factor structure held in a second, larger sample, that invariance conclusions were consistent, and that some associations replicated while others did not, De Buck and Pauwels have given the field an unusually honest picture of which parts of the three-domain model are bedrock and which parts remain provisional. The Dutch TDDS emerges as a reliable and valid instrument for capturing domain-specific disgust sensitivity relevant to moral, social, and intergroup processes, and the selective pattern of its external correlations suggests that the next generation of disgust research will need to be as precise about which disgust it is measuring as the scale itself now is.

Subject of Research: Psychometric validation of the Dutch Three-Domain Disgust Scale measuring pathogen, sexual, and moral disgust

Article Title: The Dutch Three-Domain Disgust Scale (TDDS): structural validity, measurement invariance, and nomological associations across two large samples

Article References: De Buck, A., & Pauwels, L. J. (2026). The Dutch Three-Domain Disgust Scale (TDDS): structural validity, measurement invariance, and nomological associations across two large samples. BMC Psychology. https://doi.org/10.1186/s40359-026-05703-y

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1186/s40359-026-05703-y

Keywords: disgust sensitivity, Three-Domain Disgust Scale, psychometrics, measurement invariance, confirmatory factor analysis, sex differences, moral psychology, pathogen disgust, sexual disgust, moral disgust, construct validity, Ghent University