Department of Psychology, Florida Gulf Coast University, Fort Myers, FL, 33965-6565, USA.
Department of Biological Sciences, Florida Gulf Coast University, Fort Myers, FL, 33965-6565, USA.
Sci Rep. 2024 Feb 29;14(1):5050. doi: 10.1038/s41598-024-55149-8.
In the last decade, the behavioral sciences have described the phenomenon of trypophobia, which is the discomfort felt by some individuals when viewing images containing clusters of bumps or holes. One evolutionary hypothesis for this phenomenon is that this visual discomfort represents an adaptation which helps organisms avoid skin disease and/or ectoparasites. Even though trypophobic imagery and disease imagery are both examples of visual textures, to date there has been no comparison of the visual discomfort elicited by these two specific kinds of textures within the larger context of the visual comfort elicited by natural texture imagery more generally. In the present study, we administered the Trypophobia Questionnaire (TQ) and recorded the visual comfort ratings elicited by a large set of standard natural texture images, including several trypophobic and skin disease images. In two independent samples, we found that while all observers find skin diseases uncomfortable to view, only those scoring high on the TQ rated trypophobic imagery equally uncomfortable. Comparable effects were observed using both standard ANOVA procedures as well as linear mixed effects modeling. Comparing the ratings of both high-TQ and low-TQ participants to the standard textures, we find remarkably consistent rank-order preferences, with the most unpleasant textures (as rated by both groups) exhibiting qualitative similarities to trypophobic imagery. However, we also find that low-level image statistics which have been previously shown to affect visual comfort are poor predictors of the visual comfort elicited by natural textures, including trypophobic and disease imagery. Our results suggest that a full understanding of the visual comfort elicited by natural textures, including those arising from skin disease, will ultimately depend upon a better understanding of cortical areas specialized for the perception of surface and material properties, and how these visual regions interact with emotional brain areas to evoke appropriate behavioral responses, like disgust.
在过去的十年中，行为科学描述了一种名为“密集恐惧症”的现象，即某些人在看到包含凸起或凹陷的簇状图像时会感到不适。对于这种现象的一种进化假说认为，这种视觉不适代表了一种适应机制，有助于生物体避免皮肤疾病和/或外寄生虫。尽管密集恐惧症图像和疾病图像都是视觉纹理的示例，但迄今为止，在更广泛的自然纹理图像引起的视觉舒适度的背景下，尚未对这两种特定纹理类型引起的视觉不适进行比较。在本研究中，我们使用密集恐惧症问卷（TQ）对一系列标准自然纹理图像引起的视觉舒适度进行了评估，其中包括一些密集恐惧症和皮肤疾病图像。在两个独立的样本中，我们发现虽然所有观察者都发现皮肤疾病的图像令人不适，但只有那些 TQ 得分较高的观察者才会将密集恐惧症图像评为同等不适。使用标准方差分析程序和线性混合效应模型都观察到了类似的效果。将高 TQ 和低 TQ 参与者的评分与标准纹理进行比较，我们发现非常一致的等级偏好，最令人不适的纹理（两组均评定）与密集恐惧症图像具有相似的定性特征。然而，我们还发现，先前被证明会影响视觉舒适度的低水平图像统计数据并不能很好地预测自然纹理引起的视觉舒适度，包括密集恐惧症和疾病图像。我们的结果表明，要全面了解自然纹理引起的视觉舒适度，包括源于皮肤疾病的纹理，最终将取决于更好地理解专门用于感知表面和材料特性的皮质区域，以及这些视觉区域如何与情感大脑区域相互作用以引发适当的行为反应，如厌恶。
