Trypophobia as an urbanized emotion: comparative research in ethnic minority regions of China

Siqi Zhu; Kyoshiro Sasaki; Yue Jiang; Kun Qian; Yuki Yamada

doi:10.7717/peerj.8837

Trypophobia as an urbanized emotion: comparative research in ethnic minority regions of China

PeerJ. 2020 Mar 18:8:e8837. doi: 10.7717/peerj.8837. eCollection 2020.

Authors

Siqi Zhu¹, Kyoshiro Sasaki^{2

3

4}, Yue Jiang⁵, Kun Qian⁶, Yuki Yamada³

Affiliations

¹ Graduate School of Human-Environment Studies, Kyushu University, Fukuoka, Japan.
² Faculty of Science and Engineering, Waseda University, Tokyo, Japan.
³ Faculty of Arts and Science, Kyushu University, Fukuoka, Japan.
⁴ Japan Society for the Promotion of Science, Tokyo, Japan.
⁵ School of Ethnology and Sociology, Yunnan University, Kunming, China.
⁶ Institute of Decision Science for a Sustainable Society, Kyushu University, Fukuoka, Japan.

Abstract

Trypophobia is a strong emotion of disgust evoked by clusters of holes or round objects (e.g., lotus seed pod). It has become increasingly popular and been studied since 2010s, mainly in the West and Japan. Considering this, trypophobia might be a modern emotion, and hence urbanization possibly plays key roles in trypophobia. To address this issue, we compared the degree of trypophobia between urban and less urban people in China. In an experiment, we asked participants about their degree of discomfort from trypophobic images. The results showed that trypophobia occurred in both groups, although the effect size was larger in urban than less urban people. Moreover, post-experimental interviews and post-hoc analyses revealed that older people in less urban area did not experience as much trypophobia. Our findings suggest that trypophobia links to urbanization and age-related properties.

Keywords: Cognition; Cultural differences; Disgust; Emotion; Vision.

Grants and funding

This research was supported by JSPS KAKENHI (15H05709, 16H01866, 17H00875, 17H06342, 17J05236, 18H04199, 18K12015 and 19K14482). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.