ArticleAnimals : an open access journal from MDPI2021
The Ultimate List of the Most Frightening and Disgusting Animals: Negative Emotions Elicited by Animals in Central European Respondents.
Article in Animals : an open access journal from MDPI, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 13 papers.
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Who cites it
13 citing papers in PubMed, 38 citations in OpenAlex.
- Why Are Some Snakes More Terrifying and What Is Behind the Fear?Animals : an open access journal from MDPI · 2025Article
- Hooding cobras can get ahead of other snakes in the ability to evoke human fear.Die Naturwissenschaften · 2024Article
- Validation of the open biological negative image set for a Portuguese population: Comparing Japanese and Portuguese samples and an exploration of low-order visual properties of the stimuli.Behavior research methods · 2024Article
- Animals evoking fear in the Cradle of Humankind: snakes, scorpions, and large carnivores.Die Naturwissenschaften · 2023Article
- Pareidolic faces receive prioritized attention in the dot-probe task.Attention, perception & psychophysics · 2023Article
- WASP: the World Archives of Species Perception.Database : the journal of biological databases and curation · 2023Article
- Are vipers prototypic fear-evoking snakes? A cross-cultural comparison of Somalis and Czechs.Frontiers in psychology · 2023Article
- Assessing factors influencing students' perceptions towards animal species conservation.PeerJ · 2023Article
- Human emotional evaluation of ancestral and modern threats: fear, disgust, and anger.Frontiers in psychology · 2023Article
- Do Spiders Ride on the Fear of Scorpions? A Cross-Cultural Eye Tracking Study.Animals : an open access journal from MDPI · 2022Article
- Snakebite Envenomation, Attitudes, and Behavior toward Snakes in Banten, Indonesia.Animals : an open access journal from MDPI · 2022Article
- Emotions triggered by live arthropods shed light on spider phobia.Scientific reports · 2021Article
- Specificity of spiders among fear- and disgust-eliciting arthropods: Spiders are special, but phobics not so much.PloS one · 2021Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
6 authors at 2 institutions in 1 country.
Funding
Abstract
Animals have always played an important role in our everyday life. They are given more attention than inanimate objects, which have been adaptive during the evolution of mankind, with some animal species still presenting a real threat to us. In this study, we focused on the species usually evaluated as the scariest and most disgusting in the animal kingdom. We analyzed which characteristics (e.g., weight, potential threat for humans) influence their evaluation in a nonclinical Central European WEIRD population (Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic). The tested animals were divided into two separated sets containing 34 standardized photos evoking predominantly one negative emotion, fear or disgust. The pictures were ranked according to their emotional intensity by 160 adult respondents with high inter-rater agreement. The most fear-eliciting species are mostly large vertebrates (e.g., carnivorans, ungulates, sharks, crocodiles), whereas smaller fear-evoking vertebrates are represented by snakes and invertebrates are represented by arachnids. The most disgust-evoking animals are human endo- and ectoparasites or animals visually resembling them. Humans emotionally react to fear-evoking animals that represent a real threat; however, identifying truly dangerous disgust-evoking animals might be harder. The results also support a somewhat special position of snakes and spiders.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.