Abstract

This article discusses the hypothesis that the perception of disgust and ugliness share a common neurocognitive pattern. To address this hypothesis, I reviewed the literature on the neural correlates of the experience of ugliness and disgust in healthy individuals and in clinical populations affected by alterations of body perception/body representation. The results are in line with the suggestion of a possible linking between disgust and ugliness in the human cognitive system. This is in line with the theories of «neural recycling» according to which high-level cognitive functions developed from older neural structures/processes.