Food disgust sensitivity predicts disease-preventing behaviour beyond the food domain in the COVID-19 pandemic in Germany

Jeanine Ammann; Meret Casagrande

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0254648

Peer Review History

Original SubmissionApril 15, 2021
21 May 2021 Decision Letter - Valerio Capraro, Editor PONE-D-21-12532 Food disgust sensitivity predicts disease-preventing behaviour beyond the food domain in the COVID-19 pandemic in Germany. PLOS ONE Dear Dr. Ammann, Thank you for submitting your manuscript to PLOS ONE. After careful consideration, we feel that it has merit but does not fully meet PLOS ONE’s publication criteria as it currently stands. Therefore, we invite you to submit a revised version of the manuscript that addresses the points raised during the review process. Please find below the reviewer's comments, as well as those of mine. Please submit your revised manuscript by Jul 05 2021 11:59PM. If you will need more time than this to complete your revisions, please reply to this message or contact the journal office at plosone@plos.org. When you're ready to submit your revision, log on to https://www.editorialmanager.com/pone/ and select the 'Submissions Needing Revision' folder to locate your manuscript file. 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Therefore, I would like to invite you to revise your work for Plos One. Needless to say that all the reviewer's comments should be addressed. Moreover, I would like to add a few more comments from my own reading of the paper, mainly regarding the literature review. Indeed, you report several interesting results that are in line with previous work, and so they should be discussed in this larger context: (i) You report a correlation between feeling of fears and preventative behaviour. This correlation has been reported also in other studies (Capraro & Barcelo, 2020; Dryhurst et al. 2020); (ii) you find gender differences in preventative behavior. This was also reported previously (Capraro & Barcelo, 2020); (iii) This "perspective article" on what social and behavioural science can do to support pandemic response can be useful: Van Bavel et al. (2020). I am looking forward for the revision. Capraro V, Barcelo H (2020) The effect of messaging and gender on intentions to wear a face covering to slow down COVID-19 transmission. Journal of Behavioral Economics for Policy 4, Special Issue 2, 45-55. Dryhurst, S., Schneider, C. R., Kerr, J., Freeman, A. L., Recchia, G., Van Der Bles, A. M., ... & van der Linden, S. (2020). Risk perceptions of COVID-19 around the world. Journal of Risk Research, 23(7-8), 994-1006. Van Bavel JJ, et al (2020) Using social and behavioural science to support COVID-19 pandemic response. Nature Human Behaviour 4, 460-471. Journal Requirements: When submitting your revision, we need you to address these additional requirements. 1. Please ensure that your manuscript meets PLOS ONE's style requirements, including those for file naming. 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Please do not edit.] Reviewers' comments: Reviewer's Responses to Questions Comments to the Author 1. Is the manuscript technically sound, and do the data support the conclusions? The manuscript must describe a technically sound piece of scientific research with data that supports the conclusions. Experiments must have been conducted rigorously, with appropriate controls, replication, and sample sizes. The conclusions must be drawn appropriately based on the data presented. Reviewer #1: Partly ******** 2. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously? Reviewer #1: Yes ****** 3. Have the authors made all data underlying the findings in their manuscript fully available? The PLOS Data policy requires authors to make all data underlying the findings described in their manuscript fully available without restriction, with rare exception (please refer to the Data Availability Statement in the manuscript PDF file). The data should be provided as part of the manuscript or its supporting information, or deposited to a public repository. For example, in addition to summary statistics, the data points behind means, medians and variance measures should be available. If there are restrictions on publicly sharing data—e.g. participant privacy or use of data from a third party—those must be specified. Reviewer #1: No ****** 4. Is the manuscript presented in an intelligible fashion and written in standard English? PLOS ONE does not copyedit accepted manuscripts, so the language in submitted articles must be clear, correct, and unambiguous. Any typographical or grammatical errors should be corrected at revision, so please note any specific errors here. Reviewer #1: Yes ****** 5. Review Comments to the Author Please use the space provided to explain your answers to the questions above. You may also include additional comments for the author, including concerns about dual publication, research ethics, or publication ethics. (Please upload your review as an attachment if it exceeds 20,000 characters) Reviewer #1: The study investigated the link between food disgust sensitivity and an individual’s feelings, shopping behavior, and disease-preventive behavior related to the COVID-19 pandemic. The research question is interesting and the data are a valuable contribution to the field. Overall, it is an interesting and well-written manuscript. I enjoyed reading the submission very much. I have only minor comments to further improve the manuscript. 1. My main concern: causation needs to be more carefully addressed. It seems, that authors assumed that increased food disgust sensitivity may predict higher levels of fear related to COVID-19. However, higher pathogen threat (i.e. fear related to COVID-19) may influence disgust sensitivity and pathogen avoidance behavior. It is worth citing some research that demonstrates experimental manipulations of pathogen threat might up-regulate disgust sensitivity (i.e., behavioral immune system processes). The following two papers may (or may not) be useful for some of the discussion on the link between disgust sensitivity and pathogen threat during COVID-19 pandemic: https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2020.600761 https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.622634 The language throughout needs to be more cautious and authors should be more attentive to other potential causal scenarios. 2. As a general rule, a full stop is not used at the end of a title. 3. In the introduction, Authors write, “A common disgust response is avoidance, resulting in reduced pathogen contact and lower risk of infection (…) disgust is a pathogen-avoidance mechanism….” Consider specifying pathogen disgust here (reactiveness to contamination threats), since sexual and moral disgust do not appear to neutralize infection (see https://doi.org/10.1037/a0030778). 4. Perhaps a little more justification as to why, only food disgust sensitivity was measured. More space should be devoted in the introduction and methods to describing why you chose the measures you chose (the Food Disgust Scale), and why certain related measures (e.g., the Three Domain Disgust Scale, the Disgust Scale-Revised or sets of images associated with contagion risk) were not included. More transparency about your design decisions would be helpful for readers to evaluate the study's methods. 5. Any a priori decisions that factored into your sample size (rules of thumb, power analyses) should reported. 6. In affluent parts of the world it is possible to choose to avoid a pathogen if you think one may be present e.g. in expired food as other meals are available. In some environments people have no way to avoid similar warning signs – can it be assessed in future research directions? ****** 6. PLOS authors have the option to publish the peer review history of their article (what does this mean?). If published, this will include your full peer review and any attached files. If you choose “no”, your identity will remain anonymous but your review may still be made public. Do you want your identity to be public for this peer review?** For information about this choice, including consent withdrawal, please see our Privacy Policy. Reviewer #1: No [NOTE: If reviewer comments were submitted as an attachment file, they will be attached to this email and accessible via the submission site. Please log into your account, locate the manuscript record, and check for the action link "View Attachments". If this link does not appear, there are no attachment files.] While revising your submission, please upload your figure files to the Preflight Analysis and Conversion Engine (PACE) digital diagnostic tool, https://pacev2.apexcovantage.com/. PACE helps ensure that figures meet PLOS requirements. To use PACE, you must first register as a user. Registration is free. Then, login and navigate to the UPLOAD tab, where you will find detailed instructions on how to use the tool. If you encounter any issues or have any questions when using PACE, please email PLOS at figures@plos.org. Please note that Supporting Information files do not need this step. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0254648.r001
Revision 1
21 Jun 2021 Author Response Reviewer #1: The study investigated the link between food disgust sensitivity and an individual’s feelings, shopping behavior, and disease-preventive behavior related to the COVID-19 pandemic. The research question is interesting and the data are a valuable contribution to the field. Overall, it is an interesting and well-written manuscript. I enjoyed reading the submission very much. I have only minor comments to further improve the manuscript. * We thank the reviewer for this positive feedback and the helpful comments. ** 1. My main concern: causation needs to be more carefully addressed. It seems, that authors assumed that increased food disgust sensitivity may predict higher levels of fear related to COVID-19. However, higher pathogen threat (i.e. fear related to COVID-19) may influence disgust sensitivity and pathogen avoidance behavior. It is worth citing some research that demonstrates experimental manipulations of pathogen threat might up-regulate disgust sensitivity (i.e., behavioral immune system processes). The following two papers may (or may not) be useful for some of the discussion on the link between disgust sensitivity and pathogen threat during COVID-19 pandemic: https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2020.600761 https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.622634 The language throughout needs to be more cautious and authors should be more attentive to other potential causal scenarios. * We thank the reviewer for this remark. We worked through the manuscript, adapting the language, and adding more caution to the formulations. Importantly, we added more detail to the discussion: … Still, it needs to be acknowledged that correlation does not equal causation. The pandemic comes with an increased pathogen pressure, which in turn can up-regulate disgust sensitivity (Stevenson, Saluja, & Case, 2020). For instance, Stevenson et al. (2020) found that disgust levels assessed during the time of the pandemic were higher than the values reported before the pandemic. Similarly, we noticed that the average food disgust sensitivity in our sample was higher than the values reported in previous studies conducted in Germany before the pandemic (M = 3.84 [females] and M = 3.58 [males]; Egolf et al., 2019). These findings may serve as an indication that increased pathogen threat, as imposed through the pandemic, leads to an increase in disgust sensitivity. However, these interpretations should be further underpinned by additional research. ** 2. As a general rule, a full stop is not used at the end of a title. * We thank the reviewer for this remark. Full stop has been removed from the title. ** 3. In the introduction, Authors write, “A common disgust response is avoidance, resulting in reduced pathogen contact and lower risk of infection (…) disgust is a pathogen-avoidance mechanism….” Consider specifying pathogen disgust here (reactiveness to contamination threats), since sexual and moral disgust do not appear to neutralize infection (see https://doi.org/10.1037/a0030778). * We agree with the reviewer that the pathogen disgust should be defined, especially as some of our argumentation builds on pathogen disgust (see comment below). Therefore, we have added the following definition to the introduction: Tybur, Lieberman, and Griskevicius (2009) identified three domains of disgust: (1) pathogen disgust, (2) sexual disgust and (3) moral disgust. Pathogen disgust can be seen as reactiveness to contamination threats and motivates avoidance of infectious microorganisms, resulting in reduced pathogen contact and lower risk of infection A common disgust response is avoidance, resulting in reduced pathogen contact and lower risk of infection (Curtis, 2011; Shook, Thomas, & Ford, 2019; van Overveld, de Jong, & Peters, 2010). ** 4. Perhaps a little more justification as to why, only food disgust sensitivity was measured. More space should be devoted in the introduction and methods to describing why you chose the measures you chose (the Food Disgust Scale), and why certain related measures (e.g., the Three Domain Disgust Scale, the Disgust Scale-Revised or sets of images associated with contagion risk) were not included. More transparency about your design decisions would be helpful for readers to evaluate the study's methods. * We thank the reviewer for this remark. We have added the following explanations. Introduction: … We chose a food-specific measure of disgust sensitivity for three reasons. First, it has been demonstrated that there is a relationship between pathogen disgust and behaviours related to the pandemic (Gul et al., 2021). Given that we know that pathogen disgust and food disgust sensitivity are positively correlated (Egolf et al., 2019), we aimed to add to the evidence by investigating the role food disgust sensitivity plays in mitigating the effects of the pandemic. Second, the current pandemic has a huge impact on how we buy, prepare, and consume food. Therefore, we expect some conceptual overlap between food disgust sensitivity, hygiene, and behaviours related to the pandemic. Third, we aim to investigate whether food disgust sensitivity, due to its risk avoidance nature, explains variance beyond the domain of food. Given that enforcement of virus-mitigating measures is costly and public compliance cannot be taken for granted (Brouard et al., 2020), a better understanding of the mechanisms and motivations underlying virus-mitigating behaviours and attitudes can crucially contribute to the success of political measures aiming to contain the spread of the virus. Methods: The third and final section included a measure of disgust sensitivity. To the best of our knowledge, the FDS short is the only available disgust measure that specifically focuses on the domain of food. As a result, we used the 8-item short version of the Food Disgust Scale (FDS short, Hartmann & Siegrist, 2018) as a measure of food-specific disgust. ** 5. Any a priori decisions that factored into your sample size (rules of thumb, power analyses) should reported. * We thank the reviewer for pointing out that this information is missing. We have added it to the methods section: We aimed for at least 250 male and female participants each. Assuming small to medium effect sizes (d = .25), this sample size provides ample power (.80) to detect possible effects (α = .05) with a one-tailed test (Faul, Erdfelder, Lang, & Buchner, 2007). Similarly, a sample of 500 provides sufficient power to compare dependent Pearson’s correlations with common index (Faul, Erdfelder, Buchner, & Lang, 2009). ** 6. In affluent parts of the world it is possible to choose to avoid a pathogen if you think one may be present e.g. in expired food as other meals are available. In some environments people have no way to avoid similar warning signs – can it be assessed in future research directions? * We agree with the reviewer. We believe the environment is a very important aspect that needs to be investigated and discussed. We added it to the limitations and outlook section: … Given that similar constructs for food disgust sensitivity have been used cross-culturally (Ammann, Egolf, Hartmann, & Siegrist, 2020; Egolf et al., 2019), another interesting endeavour would be to test whether these relationships can be found across different countries. Not only have individuals been affected differently by the pandemic depending on their socio-demographic background (Martinez, Kopp, Lalive, Pichler, & Siegenthaler, 2021), but individual disgust sensitivity also depends strongly on the environment in which an individual lives (see Ammann, Hartmann, & Siegrist, 2019 for a discussion). Attachments Attachment Submitted filename: Reviewer_comments_R1.docx https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0254648.r002
1 Jul 2021 Decision Letter - Valerio Capraro, Editor Food disgust sensitivity predicts disease-preventing behaviour beyond the food domain in the COVID-19 pandemic in Germany PONE-D-21-12532R1 Dear Dr. Ammann, We’re pleased to inform you that your manuscript has been judged scientifically suitable for publication and will be formally accepted for publication once it meets all outstanding technical requirements. Within one week, you’ll receive an e-mail detailing the required amendments. When these have been addressed, you’ll receive a formal acceptance letter and your manuscript will be scheduled for publication. An invoice for payment will follow shortly after the formal acceptance. To ensure an efficient process, please log into Editorial Manager at http://www.editorialmanager.com/pone/, click the 'Update My Information' link at the top of the page, and double check that your user information is up-to-date. If you have any billing related questions, please contact our Author Billing department directly at authorbilling@plos.org. If your institution or institutions have a press office, please notify them about your upcoming paper to help maximize its impact. If they’ll be preparing press materials, please inform our press team as soon as possible -- no later than 48 hours after receiving the formal acceptance. Your manuscript will remain under strict press embargo until 2 pm Eastern Time on the date of publication. For more information, please contact onepress@plos.org. Kind regards, Valerio Capraro Academic Editor PLOS ONE Additional Editor Comments (optional): Reviewers' comments: https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0254648.r003
Formally Accepted
6 Jul 2021 Acceptance Letter - Valerio Capraro, Editor PONE-D-21-12532R1 Food disgust sensitivity predicts disease-preventing behaviour beyond the food domain in the COVID-19 pandemic in Germany Dear Dr. Ammann: I'm pleased to inform you that your manuscript has been deemed suitable for publication in PLOS ONE. Congratulations! Your manuscript is now with our production department. If your institution or institutions have a press office, please let them know about your upcoming paper now to help maximize its impact. If they'll be preparing press materials, please inform our press team within the next 48 hours. Your manuscript will remain under strict press embargo until 2 pm Eastern Time on the date of publication. For more information please contact onepress@plos.org. If we can help with anything else, please email us at plosone@plos.org. Thank you for submitting your work to PLOS ONE and supporting open access. Kind regards, PLOS ONE Editorial Office Staff on behalf of Dr. Valerio Capraro Academic Editor PLOS ONE https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0254648.r004

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