Brown Mitch, Tracy Ryan E, Young Steven G, Sacco Donald F
Department of Psychological Science, University of Arkansas, Fayetteville, AR 72701 USA.
Graduate Center at CUNY, New York, NY USA.
Adapt Human Behav Physiol. 2021;7(4):432-446. doi: 10.1007/s40750-021-00176-2. Epub 2021 Sep 21.
Recent findings suggest crowd salience heightens pathogen-avoidant motives, serving to reduce individuals' infection risk through interpersonal contact. Such experiences may similarly facilitate the identification, and avoidance, of diseased conspecifics. The current experiment sought to replicate and extend previous crowding research.
In this experiment, we primed participants at two universities with either a crowding or control experience before having them evaluate faces manipulated to appear healthy or diseased by indicating the degree to which they would want to interact with them.
Crowding-primed participants reported a more heightened preferences for healthy faces than control-primed participants. Additionally, crowd salience reduced aversion toward healthy faces but did not heighten aversion to diseased faces.
Results suggest crowding appears to heighten tolerance for health cues given the heightened proximal threat of infections through interpersonal contact within crowded environments. Conversely, this work extends previous findings by indicating this preference is not rooted in an aversion to cues of poor health. We frame findings from a threat management perspective in understanding how crowding fosters sensitivity toward pathogenic threats.
最近的研究结果表明，人群凸显会增强避免病原体的动机，有助于通过人际接触降低个体的感染风险。此类经历可能同样有助于识别并避免患病的同种个体。当前的实验旨在重复并扩展先前关于拥挤的研究。
在本实验中，我们让两所大学的参与者分别经历拥挤或对照体验，然后让他们通过表明与呈现健康或患病状态的面部图像互动的意愿程度，来评估这些经过处理的面部图像。
经历拥挤启动的参与者比经历对照启动的参与者表现出对健康面部更高的偏好。此外，人群凸显降低了对健康面部的厌恶，但并未增强对患病面部的厌恶。
结果表明，鉴于在拥挤环境中通过人际接触感染的近端威胁增加，拥挤似乎会提高对健康线索的耐受性。相反，这项研究扩展了先前的发现，表明这种偏好并非源于对健康不佳线索的厌恶。我们从威胁管理的角度阐述这些发现，以理解拥挤如何增强对致病威胁的敏感性。
