Stimuli that are relevant to our survival, especially those that signal the presence of a threat in the environment (e.g., threatening faces), automatically attract our attention.

The same may be true for faces displaying subtle disease cues as they may signal danger of potential contamination and, hence, disease-avoidance behaviour, which was the focus of the present research.

The present study investigated, for the first time to our knowledge, whether faces with disease cues (DF), compared to control stimuli (faces without such cues) (CF), interfered with the participants’ performance in a letter discrimination task.

Eighty-six (44 women) university students volunteered to participate in a letter discrimination task where 240 DF and 240 CF were presented.

The results confirmed our hypothesis by showing that for DF, compared to CF, participants took longer to discriminate the target letters. Moreover, the results from a further rating task showed that DF, compared to CF, were rated as significantly more disgusting and associated with disease, thus confirming our experimental manipulation and suggesting that disgust may be driving automatic attention to DF.

Our findings provide important insights on the possible influence of exogenous attention to disease cues in social avoidance behaviour, which may have relevant implications in clinical disorders with disgust at its core.

The authors have not supplied their declaration of competing interest.