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Response to dangerous animals in Europe and Africa - attention and emotions
Štolhoferová, Iveta ; Frynta, Daniel (advisor) ; Telenský, Petr (referee) ; Burda, Hynek (referee)
The focus of this thesis on the emotions elicited by certain animals and the attentional bias towards these animals in two completely different human populations - the Czech Republic and the Republic of Somaliland. Animals have long been at the center of human interest, yet our knowledge of what emotions animals evoke is surprisingly incomplete, especially outside of the so-called WEIRD societies. We found that snakes, scorpions, and large carnivores elicited the greatest fear in Somalis. Among Czechs, however, spiders were also among the most feared animals. Both populations were the least afraid of beetles and grasshoppers. Spontaneous attentional bias during free viewing of two simultaneously presented images reflected both this cross-cultural difference and agreement. When a scorpion and a spider were presented together, the Somalis looked significantly more at the scorpion, but the Czechs distributed their attention more evenly between the two animals, although a slight bias in favor of the scorpion was apparent. In contrast, when the grasshopper was presented with a spider or a scorpion, both Czechs and Somalis looked much less at the grasshopper. In the case of snakes, a stimulus highly feared by both Somalis and Czechs, we focused on the effect of the threatening posture on the spontaneous...
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