The influence of movement on negative and positive emotional responses to animals

Moving spiders do not boost visual search in spider fear

Previous research on attention to fear-relevant stimuli has largely focused on static pictures or drawings, and thus did not consider the potential effect of natural motion. Here, we aimed to investigate the effect of motion on attentional capture in spider-fearful and non-fearful participants by using point-light stimuli and naturalistic videos. Point-light stimuli consist of moving dots representing joints and thereby visualizing biological motion (e.g. of a walking human or cat) without needing a visible body. Spider-fearful (n = 30) and non-spider-fearful (n = 31) participants completed a visual search task with moving targets (point-light/naturalistic videos) and static distractors (images), static targets and moving distractors, or static targets and static distractors. Participants searched for a specified animal type (snakes, spiders, cats, or doves) as quickly as possible. We replicated previous findings with static stimuli: snakes were detected faster and increased distraction, while spiders just increased distraction. However, contrary to our hypotheses, spider targets did not speed up responses, neither in the group of control nor in the group of spider-fearful participants. Interestingly, stimuli-specific effects were toned down, abolished, or even changed direction when motion was introduced. Also, we demonstrated that point-light stimuli were of similar efficiency as naturalistic videos, indicating that for testing effects of motion in visual search, "pure" motion stimuli might be sufficient. As we do show a substantial modulation of visual search phenomena by biological motion, we advocate for future studies to use moving stimuli, equivalent to our dynamic environment, to increase ecological validity.

Animal eMotion, or the emotional evaluation of moving animals

Responding adequately to the behaviour of human and non-human animals in our environment has been crucial for our survival. This is also reflected in our exceptional capacity to detect and interpret biological motion signals. However, even though our emotions have specifically emerged as automatic adaptive responses to such vital stimuli, few studies investigated the influence of biological motion on emotional evaluations. Here, we test how the motion of animals affects emotional judgements by contrasting static animal images and videos. We investigated this question (1) in non-fearful observers across many different animals, and (2) in observers afraid of particular animals across four types of animals, including the feared ones. In line with previous studies, we find an idiosyncratic pattern of evoked emotions across different types of animals. These emotions can be explained to different extents by regression models based on relevant predictor variables (e.g. familiarity, dangerousness). Additionally, our findings show a boosting effect of motion on emotional evaluations across all animals, with an additional increase in (negative) emotions for moving feared animals (except snakes). We discuss implications of our results for experimental and clinical research and applications, highlighting the importance of experiments with dynamic and ecologically valid stimuli.