Olivos-Jara Pablo, Segura-Fernández Raquel, Rubio-Pérez Cristina, Felipe-García Beatriz
Department of Psychology, School of Labor Relations and Human Resources, University of Castilla-La Mancha, Albacete, Spain.
Department of Pedagogy, School of Education, University of Castilla-La Mancha, Albacete, Spain.
Front Psychol. 2020 Mar 20;11:511. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2020.00511. eCollection 2020.
Connectedness to nature is a concept that reflects the emotional relationship between the self and the natural environment, based on the theory of biophilia, the innate predisposition to the natural environment. However, the biophobic component has largely been ignored, despite, given its adaptive functional role, being an essential part of the construct. If there is a phylogenetic component underlying nature connectedness, biophilic, and/or biophobic, there should be evidence of this record from early childhood. The main aim of this study is therefore to describe the emotional attributions identified in 5 years old.
Two studies were conducted. In the first, 94 children expressed their concept of nature and made basic emotional attributions to a set of 30 images of natural, using a software designed for the study. In the second, 39 children repeated the procedure and provided explanations for their responses.
The main results show that, in general, children use both positive and negative emotions, which may be related to a three-dimensional model of emotional attributions to nature. The most widely attributed emotion is happiness. However, fear is the second most common attribution. The role of happiness could be explained by a feeling of security and familiarity, while the importance of fear in nature could show an adaptive response of the fear of wild nature in children. This interpretation could be confirmed when analyzing specifically the emotional attributions, classifying the images according to biological and ecosystemic criteria. Thus, for example, more emotional attributions are explained by the "pleasantness" attributed to primary producers and landscapes (e.g., flora), versus attributions of "harm" to the images of secondary and tertiary consumers (e.g., hunters).
These results provide evidence in favor of a didactic procedure to study emotional attributions to images of nature in preschool children. They suggest the incorporation of biophobia as an important adaptive factor in connectedness to nature and a tripartite emotional hypothesis based on the valences of the attributed emotions.
与自然的联系是一个基于亲生物性理论的概念，该理论认为人类对自然环境具有先天的倾向，反映了自我与自然环境之间的情感关系。然而，尽管生物恐惧成分具有适应性功能作用，是这一概念的重要组成部分，但在很大程度上被忽视了。如果在与自然的联系、亲生物性和/或生物恐惧背后存在系统发育成分，那么应该从幼儿期就有相关记录的证据。因此，本研究的主要目的是描述5岁儿童的情感归因。
进行了两项研究。第一项研究中，94名儿童使用为该研究设计的软件表达他们对自然的概念，并对一组30张自然图像进行基本的情感归因。第二项研究中，39名儿童重复该过程并对他们的回答做出解释。
主要结果表明，总体而言，儿童使用积极和消极情绪，这可能与对自然的情感归因的三维模型有关。最常归因的情绪是快乐。然而，恐惧是第二常见的归因。快乐的作用可以用安全感和熟悉感来解释，而恐惧在自然中的重要性可能表明儿童对野生自然的恐惧的适应性反应。在根据生物和生态标准对图像进行分类并具体分析情感归因时，这一解释可以得到证实。例如，与对二级和三级消费者（如猎人）图像的“伤害”归因相比，更多的情感归因是由归因于初级生产者和景观（如植物群）的“愉悦感”来解释的。
这些结果为研究学前儿童对自然图像的情感归因的教学程序提供了支持证据。它们表明将生物恐惧作为与自然联系中的一个重要适应因素以及基于所归因情绪效价的三方情感假设纳入研究。
