Measures the intensity of consumer disgust elicited by advertising stimuli. Participants rate their emotional response on two items ('disgusted' and 'repulsed'). Although the individual items appear in prior emotion research, Northey et al. (2020) were the first to establish predictive validity for the index, demonstrating that disgust functions as a primary serial mediator linking conservative political ideology and male-to-male homosexual advertising imagery to negative product evaluations. The index distinguishes disgust from other negative emotions (anger) and from positive emotions (happiness, love) measured concurrently as covariates.
9-point scale (1 = not at all, 9 = extremely)
Full scale items shown. Always cite the original source when using this scale in research.
Reliability reported as bivariate correlation r = .92 (p < .001), equivalent to α ≈ .96 for a 2-item scale. Validated across Study 1a (N = 859) and a replication Study 1b (N = 158) using U.S. samples recruited via research agency. Index tested as a primary mediator in a moderated serial mediation (PROCESS Model 85, 5,000 bootstrap resamples), demonstrating that disgust mediates the effect of male (versus female) homosexual advertising imagery on product attitudes, contingent on conservative political ideology. The indirect effect among conservatives was significant (B = 0.045, SE = 0.016, 95% CI: 0.019 to 0.081); among liberals it was nonsignificant. Disgust was uniquely triggered by male-to-male (not female-to-female or heterosexual) imagery in politically conservative viewers.
Northey, G., Dolan, R., Etheridge, J., Septianto, F., & van Esch, P. (2020). LGBTQ imagery in advertising: How viewers' political ideology shapes their emotional response to gender and sexuality in advertisements. Journal of Advertising Research, 60(2), 222–236.
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