Living contaminants
Read the 3 living contaminants items: raw mean, concrete examples, missing responses and interpretation limits.
Add the 3 numeric 1–6 ratings and divide by 3, rounding to one decimal. Any unscored response withholds this part’s mean. The eight means are separate; no total, norm or cutoff is calculated.
Three named living-contaminant situations
- The published English items describe a maggot in a cherry you wanted to eat, a small snail in salad you wanted to eat, and a worm in an apple. These three prompts form the living-contaminants part. They are imagined wording-defined situations; no picture, handling, tasting or contact with an animal is requested.
- You may rate the disgust each scene evokes or select an unscored answer. The wording does not ask whether you have actually experienced the event, what you did afterward or whether a food was safe. A reaction to imagining the scene is the only information being requested.
Three items, rather than four or five
- This is the only three-item part in the selected 32-item bank. Ratings of 2, 4 and 6 sum to 12, giving 12 ÷ 3 = 4.0. The denominator is three, not the four used by several other parts or the five used by hygiene. The website uses the published grouping without inventing an extra item.
- All three must be numeric from 1 to 6. Two numeric responses and one unscored response leave this mean unavailable, while complete parts elsewhere still calculate. No midpoint is inserted and no mean is calculated from just the remaining two items. Numeric coverage makes this distinction visible.
Reported disgust is the measured response
- A greater mean describes greater stated disgust for the three named scenarios. It does not measure bravery, cleanliness, infestation risk or the ability to notice an actual contaminant. A lower mean does not establish comfort with every animal or imply that a respondent should eat any particular food.
- There is no universal normal interval or clinical cutoff in this page. The result cannot diagnose a phobia or another condition and cannot estimate the likelihood of getting ill. It also gives no advice on consuming or treating a food mentioned in the source item.
The three scenes can evoke different images
- Someone might imagine the cherry scene clearly but find the snail-in-salad scene unfamiliar. Another might rate the apple scene most strongly because the wording is more vivid to them. The average does not resolve those reasons, and the questionnaire does not require the respondent to provide an explanation.
- If you select unscored, that is a recorded response rather than a low-disgust rating. You may finish with this mean unavailable and still read every section of the guide. No attempt to find a real example is needed to turn an uncertain or unwanted response into a number.
Living contaminants differ from other source details
- The hygiene part includes a hair in soup, which is not one of these three living-contaminant prompts. The source groups them separately. The questionnaire therefore does not copy a hygiene rating into this part, even when both situations seem related in your own interpretation.
- The mold and fruit parts also have their own named scenes. A larger or smaller mean across parts is a comparison of stated reactions, not a hazard ranking. The eight means are reported independently with no total, dominant category or personality type inferred from which one is greatest.
Three ratings can share an average in different ways
- Ratings of 1, 5 and 6 average 4.0, just as 4, 4 and 4 do. The first pattern has one mild and two stronger reactions; the second is even. Equal averages do not mean identical experiences, and a three-item mean cannot establish how someone reacts in every food situation.
- A person may report strong imagined disgust without having encountered any of the events. Someone who has encountered one may give a different rating today. Neither pattern proves a lasting trait or a particular history; the task records only the response you chose on this occasion.
Keep reflection at the level of the written scenes
- You can compare the three recorded choices and notice where they differ, without taking any further action. There is no need to seek out insects, examine food or test yourself through exposure. This is a questionnaire reading activity, and ending after the guide is a valid choice.
- If you retake it, use the same stated situations and answer as you wish rather than trying to reach a target mean. Optional public sharing contains no personal mean, answer record or claim about a reaction to any named animal.
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.