Abstract
Trypophobia is induced by viewing multiple clustered objects. To date, several studies have investigated why certain people experience discomfort when looking at clustered patterns. Recently, “involuntary protection against dermatosis” (IPAD) hypothesis was proposed to explain the causes of trypophobia. The IPAD hypothesis suggests that involuntary aversive responses to skin diseases cause discomfort in response to image clusters. However, this idea has not been fully investigated empirically. Therefore, the present study used a modified version of the priming procedure and tested whether the activation of the concept of skin-related diseases affected the evaluation of trypophobic images. In Experiment 1, participants engaged in a lexical decision task in which words related to skin problems, negative events, or neutral events were presented. Then, they evaluated the discomfort of trypophobic, negative, and neutral images. The results indicated that participants evaluated trypophobic images as more discomforting after they were exposed to skin-problem-related words, whereas the exposure to words related to skin-problems did not enhance the discomfort of negative images. These findings demonstrate that the association with skin-related problems increases the discomfort of trypophobic images. In Experiment 2, we further tested the reproducibility of the priming effect observed in Experiment 1 and investigated the effect of priming with words related to COVID-19 in the context of a spreading infection. Contrary to predictions, no priming effect was produced by either skin-related words or COVID-19-related words. Future studies should further explore the causal relationship of the association between skin disease and trypophobia.
Highlights
Trypophobia is induced by viewing multiple clustered objects
Yamada and S asaki[17] demonstrated that the people that had suffered from skin disease experienced more discomfort of trypophobic images than those that had never suffered from skin diseases, which is suggestive of a relationship between skin disease and trypophobia
The results indicated that trypophobic images and negative images predicted an increase in discomfort (b = 4.16, SE = 0.05, p < 0.001; b = 5.47, SE = 0.05, p < 0.001), suggesting that trypophobic and negative images were evaluated as more discomforting than neutral images
Summary
We conducted a power analysis using G*power[29,30] based on the effect size obtained in Experiment 1 (d = 0.21) to determine the minimum sample size required to identify differences in the discomfort of trypophobic images between exposure to skin problems and the neutral condition. There were 178 participants in the exposure to skin-problems condition (105 women and 73 men; mean age = 40.71 years), 182 in the COVID-19 exposure condition (100 women and 82 men; mean age = 40.02 years), and 181 in the neutral exposure condition (108 women and 73 men; mean age = 39.76 years). The participants completed the Fear of COVID-19 Scale Japanese version (FCV19SJ 28) after completing the lexical-decision task and evaluating the trypophobic images. We expected that individuals with higher Fear of COVID-19 Scale scores would be more uncomfortable with trypophobic images
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