Decaying fruit
Read the 4 decaying fruit items: raw mean, concrete examples, missing responses and interpretation limits.
Add the 4 numeric 1–6 ratings and divide by 4, rounding to one decimal. Any unscored response withholds this part’s mean. The eight means are separate; no total, norm or cutoff is calculated.
What the four fruit situations ask
- These source items concern overripe fruit, black spots on a banana, pressure marks on fruit such as apples or peaches, and apple slices that have turned brown after exposure to air. They ask about the disgust you imagine, rather than requiring a decision about buying, preparing or eating any actual fruit.
- The published factor is called decaying fruit. That is the source category name, not a statement that every described change has the same cause or practical significance. This website retains the four named situations and does not use your response as a test of freshness, risk or knowledge.
A mean of four numeric ratings
- Four ratings of 1, 2, 4 and 6 sum to 13. The raw mean is 13 ÷ 4 = 3.25, displayed as 3.3 after rounding to one decimal. Every item has equal weight within this part. There is no reverse-keyed fruit item and no extra weight for a particular kind of fruit.
- All four must be rated from 1 to 6. An unscored choice withholds this part’s mean instead of counting as zero, three or the average of the remaining items. The other seven parts are processed separately; one missing fruit rating does not erase a complete fish or hygiene result.
Stay with the stated fruit reactions
- A greater mean describes greater reported disgust for these four scenes on the offered scale. It does not establish that you dislike fruit in general, eat less fruit or have an unbalanced diet. The questionnaire asks for reactions to wording, not quantities eaten or nutritional information.
- A lesser mean does not mean you ignore changes in food or ought to accept a particular fruit. Likewise, no threshold here divides reasonable reactions from unreasonable ones. A value such as 3.3 is a raw item average, not a normal range, percentile or recommendation.
Appearance and imagined texture may differ
- Someone may react little to the appearance of apple browning but strongly to imagining the texture of overripe fruit. Another person may give the reverse pattern. Both can produce the same mean. Retaining the individual responses helps avoid treating the average as a single dislike of all changed fruit.
- The item does not ask you to explain why you chose a number. Familiarity, a remembered experience or how vividly you picture the wording may matter, but the test does not identify the cause. You can choose unscored whenever you cannot form a rating you wish to give.
Fruit changes and mold have separate items
- The mold part explicitly names mold on a tomato, bread, hard cheese and marmalade. None of the four fruit prompts supplies those same details. Its mean cannot replace the mold mean, and a person’s ratings may differ across the two parts without any contradiction.
- The vegetable part names avocado pulp, cucumber, radishes and salad. The published organization distinguishes these situations rather than combining them into a freshness score. Any comparison is about your responses to the specified scenes, not a classification of real foods into safe and unsafe groups.
One average can conceal a sharp contrast
- Ratings of 1, 1, 6 and 6 average 3.5. Four more similar ratings of 3, 3, 4 and 4 also average 3.5. The first pattern contains strong differences between items; the second is more even. Neither pattern by itself reveals food waste, eating habits or a psychological condition.
- A practical choice can differ from an imagined emotional reaction. Someone can feel little disgust and still decide not to use a food for other reasons, or report a strong reaction to a scene they never encounter. The questionnaire supplies no rule about what a respondent should consume.
Use the words for optional reflection
- If useful, compare two fruit responses and note which stated detail differs. You can leave the explanation open. There is no need to buy fruit, wait for it to change, inspect an actual item or eat anything to validate your answer. Imagined rating is the entire task.
- You may finish after reading or return to review the choices saved on this device. Public sharing uses the title and entry link only. It does not include your fruit mean, the individual answers or a claim about your eating behavior.
Source, edition and attribution
- The 32 English prompts come from Supplementary Table 2 of García-Gómez L, Romero-Rebollar C, Hartmann C, Siegrist M, Ferreira G, Gutierrez-Aguilar R, Villalpando S and Pacheco-Lopez G (2020), Food Disgust Scale: Spanish Version, Frontiers in Psychology 11:165, DOI 10.3389/fpsyg.2020.00165, reused under CC BY 4.0. The document was supplied through NLM’s PMC open-access collection. This page selects the complete English bank and the article’s 1–6 endpoints; the Spanish table’s printed 1–5 format is not used.
- Changes comprise a fresh Chinese working translation from English, optional unscored responses, complete-part missingness handling, one-decimal display and original explanatory readings. This is not the validated Spanish administration or a validated Chinese version, and source research does not validate this website. No original-author endorsement, norm, diagnosis or food-safety judgment is implied.