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Emotions and aesthetic preferences evoked by animals in the context of nature conservation
Janovcová, Markéta ; Landová, Eva (advisor) ; Stibral, Karel (referee) ; Prokop, Pavol (referee)
People have always seen animals as an important part of their lives. As a result of human activity and other factors, an increasing number of species are becoming endangered. Recently, nature conservation has become increasingly important, but conservation activities cannot do without public support, not only financial. For this reason, it is necessary to understand how people perceive animals and what implications this may have for planning conservation programmes. In this paper, we focused on positive perceptions of animals ascertained through aesthetic preferences (the beauty of the animal) and negative perception through emotions (fear and disgust). It was found that the beauty of the animal and attributed dangerousness have a decisive influence on the support of conservation activities in the preferred group of mammals, while body size and attributed intelligence do not. In contrast, reptiles are an often neglected group of vertebrates, yet they are perceived by humans quite consistently. Humans distinguish reptiles on the basis of external appearance, namely the presence of limbs. Thus, there is a separate group of legless reptiles represented mainly by snakes and legless lizards (e.g. Amphisbaenia), which have their own rules for evaluating beauty and emotions. As it was found in the...
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Neuropsychology of phobic reaction to snakes
Polák, Jakub ; Kulišťák, Petr (advisor) ; Stuchlíková, Iva (referee) ; Prokop, Pavol (referee)
Neuropsychology of phobic reaction to snakes Mgr. Jakub Polák, Ph.D. Supervisor: doc. PhDr. Petr Kulišťák, Ph.D. The snake is a psychologically very strong stimulus that triggers intense fear in a large part of the population and at the same time causes one of the most common specific phobias. According to an evolutionary hypothesis, universal snake fear is a result of selection pressures, because during evolution of the mankind, venomous snakes presented a deadly threat. Previous psychological research has therefore used the snake as a prototypical trigger of fear. However, snakes as a group are very variable in terms of morphology, colour, toxicity, and behaviour. In this dissertation, I have adopted several tools to verify the hypothesis that some species of snakes may elicit disgust rather than fear. The whole work is divided into four consecutive studies: 1) psychodiagnostics of fear of snakes and disgust using standard scales, 2) rating of snake images according to fear and disgust, 3) measurement of physiological response and 4) measurement of neural activation using fMRI. A different sample of subjects was studied in each of the four parts, however, men and women aged 18 or older with varying levels of fear of snakes and disgust propensity were included. They were mostly healthy subjects, only the...
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