Search

The present dissertation focused on better understanding the information processing underlying the behavioural immune system - a suite of psychological mechanisms that infer infection risk from perceptual cues and trigger avoidance of contact when risk is detected. Particularly, it was aimed to illuminate how individual- and contextual-level factors influence this processing. Results from the three empirical chapters reported in this dissertation suggest that the processing of pathogen cues might be encapsulated from state- and trait-level pathogen avoidance motivations. Those motivations, though, seem to play a role in the activation of the final responses generated to prevent pathogen contact. A possible explanation for this set of results might be that context- and trait-level pathogen avoidance motives are processed in parallel to the processing of pathogen cues, and are only affecting the final response initiated by adjusting the response outputted from the behavioural immune system.

12380