Abstract
Animals can evoke a wide range of emotions helping us to choose a quick and appropriate reaction towards them: approach or avoidance in general. This work has focused on disgust evoked by amphibians in humans as well as perceived beauty. Due to the high morphological variability of recent amphibian taxa, we examined humans’ cognitive categorisation of 101 amphibian photos and the effect of stimuli characteristics on disgust evaluation or beauty perception of individual groups/species. We also explored how respondents’ characteristics, e.g. gender, age and disgust sensitivity (DS-R) influence the disgust and beauty evaluation of picture stimuli on a 7-point Likert scale. The scores of disgust and beauty evaluation were strongly negatively correlated, representing the opposite ends of a single axis, further referred to as the index of preference. The most preferred amphibians belonged to anurans, whereas the least preferred ones were mostly worm-like, legless and small-eyed caecilians. Additional analyses of morphologically diverse anurans showed that species with a round body shape, short forelegs, small eyes, warts, pink and grey colouration, or dark and dull colouration were perceived as disgusting or ugly. The effect of gender and age were only marginal; however, people with higher disgust sensitivity rated amphibians as more disgusting and less beautiful, which might support the hypothesis of a possible disgust involvement in animal fears and phobias. This topic has implications not only for the nature conservation decisions of globally endangered amphibians but also for understanding the evolution of disgust and its generalisation to harmless animals.
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Acknowledgements
We are thankful to Jakub Polák for critical reading of the text and linguistic revision. Moreover, we thank all persons who provided us with photographs to use in the study, and all our respondents who agreed to take part in the study. The financial support was given by GAUK no. 1636218 (Charles University Grant Agency) and GAČR no. 17-15991S (Czech Science Foundation), personal costs of the authors were partly covered by project no. LO1611 (NPU I) provided by Ministry of Education, Youth and Sports of the Czech Republic.
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Contribution of the first two authors (DF and ŠP) is equal.
Conceived and designed the research: EL, DF; performed the research: ŠP; analysed the data: DF, MJ; wrote the paper: DF, ŠP, EL, SR.
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All the respondents agreed to participate in the project voluntarily. Each subject provided an informed consent and additional information about his/her gender and age. The authors declare that the project was approved by the Institutional Review Board (IRB), Faculty of Sciences, Charles University in Prague, approval no. 2013/7.
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Frynta, D., Peléšková, Š., Rádlová, S. et al. Human evaluation of amphibian species: a comparison of disgust and beauty. Sci Nat 106, 41 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00114-019-1635-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00114-019-1635-8