Our working group studies human relationships with animals, which, due to a long coevolutionary history, represent important psychological stimuli for us. Our attention paid to animals is prioritized and they evoke a scale of emotional reactions in us, both positive and negative. One such emotion is fear, which leads to avoidance. A clinical dimension of fear is called phobia, which is a type of anxiety disorder characterized by excessive, unreasonable fear of various objects or situations. This can make life extremely difficult for both the phobic patients and their families and considerably lower their overall psychological well-being. Fear of animals is one of the most common and persistent phobias in human subjects with a lifetime prevalence of 3.3-5.7%.
Our main focus in three points:
1) Positive and negative emotions evoked by animals. Our focus is to examine the behavioral and physiological correlates of emotions evoked by animal stimuli presented on photographs, as videos, or living animals. It is vital to refine the methodology of the measurement of the emotions using physiological measurements of eye movement, skin resistance, ECG, heart rate, or evoked potentials. Also, we study how these measurements connect to the results of self-reported fear collected using questionnaires.
2) Specific relationship of animals and humans to snakes. Next to spiders, the most common stimuli to cause the fear reaction in humans are snakes. In the past, snakes presented a real danger not only to humans but also to ancestral primates and small mammals from which we evolved. Even now, snakes cause many human deaths yearly in some countries. The ability to quickly recognize a snake, fear it, and react adequately was inevitable for the survival of our ancestors. This deeply rooted fear of snakes still persists in modern humans and because of it, we are more prone to experience phobic fear when encountering these stimuli, than any other animals, especially the unharmful ones. In our research, we focus on specific snake fear reactions evoked in both humans and non-human primates.
3) Evolutionary psychology of the phobias. We examine whether are snake-fearful (phobic) respondents less selective than controls when experiencing fear and/or disgust from a specific animal (snake) species, regardless its true dangerousness. The results may help us to reconstruct the evolutionarily relevance of particular animal species for the occurrence of various disorders, to unravel the mechanism of the occurrence of specific animal phobias, and to assess the effectiveness of possible cognitive behavioral therapies.