title: Assessment of disgust sensitivity in children with an age-downward version of the Disgust Emotion Scale.
abstract: The present study examined the psychometric properties of the Disgust Emotion Scale for Children (DES-C). Principal components analysis of the DES-C data revealed five factors reflecting disgust toward (a) rotting foods, (b) injection and blood, (c) odors, (d) mutilation and death, and (e) animals, which were largely in keeping with the intended subscales. The DES-C showed good reliability, excellent convergent validity (as established by correlations with an alternative self-report index of disgust), fairly good predictive validity (as assessed by correlations with measures of fear/anxiety and a behavioral index of disgust), and acceptable parent-child agreement (in particular with the mothers). Importantly, the DES-C proved to perform better on some psychometric indicators than an age-downward version of the Disgust Scale. These findings indicate that the DES-C should be regarded as the preferred scale for measuring disgust sensitivity and its role in the etiology and maintenance of anxiety problems in children.
authors.affiliation: Clinical Psychological Science, Faculty of Psychology and Neuroscience, Maastricht University, Maastricht, The Netherlands. peter.muris@maastrichtuniversity.nl
authors.forename: Peter
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Muris
authors.forename: Jorg
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Huijding
authors.forename: Birgit
authors.initials: B
authors.lastname: Mayer
authors.forename: Marit
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Langkamp
authors.forename: Ela
authors.initials: E
authors.lastname: Reyhan
authors.forename: Bunmi
authors.initials: B
authors.lastname: Olatunji
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D001007:Anxiety / Q000523:psychology*; D002648:Child; D004644:Emotions; D005163:Factor Analysis, Statistical; D005239:Fear; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D008875:Middle Aged; D010290:Parents; D010698:Phobic Disorders / Q000523:psychology*; D011594:Psychometrics / Q000295:instrumentation; D015203:Reproducibility of Results; D012307:Risk Factors; D011795:Surveys and Questionnaires