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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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Depressive rumination: testing the analytical rumination hypothesis in patients with depressive disorder
Janíčková, Petra ; Preiss, Marek (advisor) ; Dymešová, Gabriela (referee)
Depression is commonly viewed as a pathology. Depressive rumination, one of the key symptoms of depression is thought to be a maladaptive cognitive style that contributes to worse and longer depressive episodes. Here I present an alternative approach called the analytical rumination hypothesis (ARH). ARH proposes that depression is an evolved response to complex analytical problems. In a study on inmate patients of the National institute of mental health in Klecany with diagnosed depression we tested the validity of the ARH through assessing the influence of depressive rumination on mood, cognitive performance and electrophysiological correlates. Rumination was experimentally induced by expressive writing. In the control condition we used the distractive writing method. The results show a corresponding effect of rumination on the mood of our patients as expected. However, we were not able to see the proposed effects on cognitive abilities. KEY WORDS Depression, rumination, adaptation, cognition, affective state, neural correlates
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Aesthetic and emotional evaluation of butterflies and moths (Lepidoptera) and its implications
Končická, Anna ; Frynta, Daniel (advisor) ; Sedláček, František (referee)
Animals play a significant role in human societies. As significant psychological stimuli, they evoke not only positive but also negative emotions. Human efforts on animal conservation are directly linked to the way in which those animals are aesthetically percieved. This master's thesis is focused on the aesthetic and emotional evaluation of butterflies and moths, using a method of ranking visual stimuli and scoring on a point scale. The aim of this thesis is both to compare various methods of beauty evaluation among a group Lepidoptera and to analyze the influence of butterflies' position on presented stimuli on the resulting beauty evaluations. Furthermore, this thesis focuses on negative emotions (disgust) evoked by butterflies and moths. Last but not least, the influence of morphological and color characteristics of butterflies and moths on beauty evaluations is analyzed. The characteristics and attitudes of respondents are also analyzed as a possible influential factor of the evaluation. It was found that all investigated testing methods could be used to evaluate the beauty of butterflies and moths and that they produced similar results. It was also found that wing positions of butterflies and moths have a particularly notable effect on their beauty evaluations, especially for certain species....
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The evolved information processing design of the human mating mind
Semchenko, Ayten Yeşim ; Kleisner, Karel (advisor) ; Varella Valentova, Jaroslava (referee) ; Marcinkowska, Urszula (referee)
In this dissertation, I investigated the psychological adaptations designed to overcome the challenge of mate acquisition through its sub-problems such as (not) missing an opportunity to interact with a potentially suitable partner, identifying mates who exhibit specific fitness-relevant cues, identifying mates that are available to us, and identifying (right) ways of appearance-enhancement. In an attempt to unravel the psychological adaptations designed to solve the stated sub-problems of mate acquisition, I studied the effect of the theoretically-anchored inputs such as biological sex, incomplete visual information, mating context, lumbar curvature angle, and back arching behavior. Through investigating the effects of those inputs (e.g., mating context and lumbar curvature angle), I found outputs consistent with the proposed psychological adaptations (e.g., male preference for an intermediate lumbar curvature angle in women) designed to solve the sub-problems of mate acquisition (e.g., identifying mates with the specific fitness-enhancing trait). Furthermore, these findings indicated that our approach to studying the human mating mind led to accurately identified inputs producing the predicted outputs.
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Responses of naive primates to snakes: experiments with selected species kept in Prague zoo
Kutinová, Lucie ; Frynta, Daniel (advisor) ; Fuchs, Roman (referee)
In the wild, snakes are known to elicit strong antipredator responses in primates. Primates often mob the snakes, which is also accompanied by loud calls. In evolution, the deadly threat posed by snakes goes as far as to the origin of placental mammals. In this study, the reactions of naïve individuals to snakes were tested. Naïve pigtail macaques (Macaca nemestrina) and mouse lemurs (Microcebus murinus) avoided the snake stimulus. For the macaques there was a longer latency to touch the rubber snake compared to the latency to touch the rubber lizard. The mouse lemurs avoided feeding on the side of experimental box where the snake odor was presented. The reactions of macaques and mouse lemurs were not accompanied by vocalizations and they seemed to be overall mild. Nevertheless, the snake stimuli used here were strong enough for these naïve primates. For ringtail lemurs (Lemur catta), the reactions to uncovering a hidden rubber snake was tested. But the lemurs showed no avoiding reactions. A question for further research is whether the different results for lemurs were not caused by different experimental procedure. As well as in macaques and mouse lemurs, the reactions seemed to be very mild. But no deeper analysis of the behavior was performed. Thus, a reaction could have been overlooked, which...
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Phytophily - its origin and influence onto humans
Hůla, Martin ; Komárek, Stanislav (advisor) ; Kleisner, Karel (referee)
Phytophilia, the love of plants, is a widespread and probably inborn human quality. This work shows evolutionary interpretations of its origin. These suggest that phytophilia has evolved as an adaptation to the choice of the resource-rich habitat and to the effective orientation in space. The work also presents the effects of plants on human psyche and briefly mentions cultural and individual differences.
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The influence of oral hormonal contraceptive use on female sexuality: the evolutionary perspective
Klapilová, Kateřina ; Weiss, Petr (advisor) ; Procházka, Ivo (referee) ; Blažek, Vladimír (referee)
The proposed thesis is comprised of eleven papers connected by the employment of the evolutionary psychological approach in research on various aspects of human sexuality. The aim of the first monothematic part is to demonstrate the evolutionary-psychological approach to one recent phenomenon in female sexuality - the use of oral contraceptives (OC). OC use has been shown to suppress psychological mechanisms that are considered to be adaptive in the fertile period of the natural menstrual cycle. In particular, OC users' ratings of male stimuli that provide the cues of genetic quality and compatibility are lower in comparison with normally cycling women. Moreover, the increase in sexual desire and in the prevalence of proceptive behaviour observed during mid-cycle in normally cycling women is diminished. However, the impact of this phenomenon on mate-choice and relationship dynamics in an ecological context has not been studied. In the first study, we have analyzed the data of Czech women obtained via representative sampling within the Czech National Survey of Sexual Behavior. Results indicated that normally cycling women had a significantly higher number of one-night stands during the last year in comparison to OC users even when living in a long-term relationship. OC usage was also shown to have...
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Hierarchy and human behavior. BDSM as an alternative sexual behaviour.
Jozífková, Eva ; Weiss, Petr (advisor) ; Bob, Petr (referee) ; Zvěřina, Jaroslav (referee)
Preferences for sexual arousal by overstated dominance and submission in sex is categorized as F65.5, sadomasochism, according to ICD, but this behaviour is called BDSM among the general public. The ground of these preferences could be ultimately biological. These preferences reflect behavioural strategy which enables to gain higher reproductive success. Men and women who were sexually aroused by a submissive partner had more male relatives than men and women with other preferences. Contrary to the women, the dominant men reported themselves as more attractive. Women who were aroused by a higher-ranking partner considered themselves more attractive. Sons of couples in which was hierarchical disparity had more siblings than sons of "equal" couples or couples with no hierarchical disparity. Daughters of hierarchically disparate couples had more brothers than daughters of "both dominant" partners. Concurrently, number and gender of offspring as well as self- reported attractiveness are likely to be criteria of the reproductive success in humans. It is also interesting that hierarchically disparate couples, without regard to gender of higher-ranking partner, reached higher reproductive success than "equal" couples. Individuals who preferred higher- or lower-ranking partner were also aroused by...
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