Understanding animal fears a comparison of the cognitive vulnerability and harm-looming models 英文参考文献.docVIP

BMC Psychiatry BioMedCentral Research article Open Access Understanding animal fears: a comparison of the cognitive vulnerability and harm-looming models Jason M Armfield Address: Australian Research Centre for Population Oral Health, School of Dentistry, University of Adelaide, South Australia, Australia Email: Jason M Armfield - jason.armfield@.au Published: 1 December 2007 Received: 21 June 2007 Accepted: 1 December 2007 BMC Psychiatry 2007, 7:68 doi:10.1186/1471-244X-7-68 This article is available from: /1471-244X/7/68 ? 2007 Armfield; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Abstract Background: The Cognitive Vulnerability Model holds that both clinical and sub-clinical manifestations of animal fears are a result of how an animal is perceived, and can be used to explain both individual differences in fear acquisition and the uneven distribution of fears in the population. This study looked at the association between fear of a number of animals and perceptions of the animals as uncontrollable, unpredictable, dangerous and disgusting. Also assessed were the perceived loomingness, prior familiarity, and negative evaluation of the animals as well as possible conditioning experiences. Methods: 162 first-year University students rated their fear and perceptions of four high-fear and four low-fear animals. Results: Perceptions of the animals as dangerous, disgusting and uncontrollable were significantly associated with fear of both high- and low-fear animals while perceptions of unpredictability were significantly associated with fear of high-fear animals. Conditioning experiences were unrelated to fear of any animals. In multiple regression analyses, loomingness did not acc