A cross-cultural study of animal fears

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Abstract

The present study represents a cross-cultural study of animal fears in which subjects from seven Western and Asian countries were asked to rate their fear of a range of familiar animals. Factor analyses of these ratings in all samples revealed a coherent three factor solution in which animals fell into a fear-irrelevant, fear-relevant (fierce) or disgust-relevant category. The core group of animals making up the disgust-relevant category were similar across cultures. Some views on how a universal disgust-relevant category of feared animals may have developed are discussed.

Section snippets

Subjects

The subjects were students at academic institutions in the following countries: United Kingdom (UK), India, USA, The Netherlands, Korea, Hong Kong, and Japan. The UK cohort consisted of 87 males and 135 females (N=222) with a mean age of 22.22 yr (range 18 to 52 yr); the Indian cohort consisted of 102 males and 98 females (N=200) with a mean age of 18.01 yr (range 16 to 20 yr); the USA cohort consisted of 83 males and 128 females (N=211) with a mean age of 19.87 yr (range 18 to 40 yr); the

Missing data and data screening

A number of countries had missing data. For the UK no data were collected for maggot, for India, no data were collected for hamster, budgie, gerbil, maggot, or slug, and for Korea and Japan data were missing for gerbil.

Cross-cultural comparisons of overall ratings

Fig. 1 shows the median rating plus variance estimates for all animals separately for each country. This shows that the median ratings and variance for UK, India, USA, Dutch and Korea samples are favourably comparable, but that the median rating for Hong Kong and Japan samples

Discussion

The results of the overall factor analysis show that the three factor solution separates animals into coherent fear-irrelevant, fear-relevant (fierce) and disgust-relevant categories, and the individual solutions from each of the countries sampled closely resemble this overall solution. Animals in the disgust-relevant category are similar to those found in a fear-relevant, nonpredatory category revealed in a factor analytic study by Ware et al. (1994). That these animals were disgust-relevant

Acknowledgements

The authors are grateful to Dale Griffin for his advice on the statistical analyses carried out in this study.

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