Different judgment frameworks for moral compliance and moral violation.

In recent decades, the field of moral psychology has focused on moral judgments based on some moral foundations/categories (e.g., harm/care, fairness/reciprocity, ingroup/loyalty, authority/respect, and purity/sanctity). When discussing the moral categories, however, whether a person judges moral compliance or moral violation has been rarely considered. We examined the extent to which moral judgments are influenced by each other across moral categories and explored whether the framework of judgments for moral violation and compliance would be different. For this purpose, we developed the episodes set for moral and affective behaviors. For each episode, participants evaluated valence, arousal, morality, and the degree of relevance to each of the Haidt's 5 moral foundations. The cluster analysis showed that the moral compliance episodes were divided into three clusters, whereas the moral violation episodes were divided into two clusters. Also, the additional experiment indicated that the clusters might not be stable in time. These findings suggest that people have different framework of judgments for moral compliance and moral violation.

Visual images of disgusting creatures facilitated attentional orienting and delayed attentional disengagement.

Numerous studies have suggested that threatening stimuli induce a spatial attention bias; however, only a few studies have investigated spatial attention biases for disgusting stimuli. Moreover, past studies generally reported that the spatial attention bias to disgusting images is not robustly in normal individuals. We hypothesized that this was due to the unfamiliar of the images, so we prepared the creature's images that were clearly categorized as disgusting and examined the effects of disgusting images on spatial attention bias. A disgusting or an emotionally neutral image was paired and presented with an (emotionally neutral) filler image. After a temporal interval, a target appeared at either the position where a disgusting or a neutral image was presented (valid condition) or where a filler image was presented (invalid condition). Participants pressed a key corresponding to the target's position as quickly and accurately as possible. We varied the position-response correspondence among three experiments. The results showed that the RTs in the invalid condition was longer for the disgusting images than for the neutral images when the position of a disgusting image was not naturally associated with the left-right hand position. We interpreted the results in that that disgusting images generally slowed down attentional disengagement process but the manual responses were inhibited for the position where a disgusting image appeared when the locations of keys and targets were congruent. The present results suggest that disgusting images affect not only attentional processes but also manual responses related to the selection and initiation of responses.

Morality extracted under crowding impairs face identification.

We investigated whether morality associated with faces is perceptible even under less optimal visual conditions such as crowding. A facial image was paired with a sentence describing an immoral act or a neutral act. Participants imagined the person performing the actions described in the sentence during the learning phase. Then, in the crowding phase, the target face was briefly presented in the left or right peripheral visual fields. Participants were required to judge the gender or morality of the target face in Experiment 1 and to choose the target face from two faces in Experiment 2. In both experiments, flankers were presented around the target face in the flanker condition, whereas no flankers were presented in the no-flanker condition. Experiment 1 indicated that the accuracy of judgments about the morality of a crowded face was higher for immoral faces than for neutral faces. This demonstrates that morality is preferentially extracted even when conscious access to facial representations is limited. Experiment 2 showed that the accuracy of selecting the flanked face from two faces was higher for neutral faces than for immoral faces. These indicated that the morality processed under the crowding impaired the discrimination of the facial identity.

Open biological negative image set.

Scientists conducting affective research often use visual, emotional images, to examine the mechanisms of defensive responses to threatening and dangerous events and objects. Many studies use the rich emotional images from the International Affective Picture System (IAPS) to facilitate affective research. While IAPS images can be classified into emotional categories such as fear or disgust, the number of images per discrete emotional category is limited. We developed the Open Biological Negative Image Set (OBNIS) consisting of 200 colour and greyscale creature images categorized as disgusting, fearful or neither. Participants in Experiment 1 (N = 210) evaluated the images' valence and arousal and classified them as disgusting, fearful or neither. In Experiment 2, other participants (N = 423) rated the disgust and fear levels of the images. As a result, the OBNIS provides valence, arousal, disgust and fear ratings and 'disgusting,' 'fearful' and 'neither' emotional categories for each image. These images are available to download on the Internet (https://osf.io/pfrx4/?view_only=911b1be722074ad4aab87791cb8a72f5).

Priming with skin-problems increases fear of clusters.

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.

Affective evaluation of images influences personality judgments through gaze perception.

Faces that consistently shifted the gaze to subsequent target locations in a gaze cueing task were chosen as being more trustworthy than faces that always looked away from the target, suggesting that the validity of a gaze cue influenced the viewers' judgments regarding the trustworthiness of human faces. We investigated whether the gaze cueing effect and judgments regarding the personality conveyed by a face would be affected by the valence of a target. A face image moved its eyes to the left or the right, and an emotional target image (positive, negative, or neutral) appeared to left or right of the face. Participants had to indicate the location of this target by pressing a key. The target image was preceded by a face that shifted its gaze to the target image (valid cue), a face that directed its gaze to the opposite side (invalid cue), or a face that did not move its eyes (no cue). The perceived trustworthiness of the face was evaluated after the gaze-cueing task. Results showed that faces that looked at positive targets were evaluated as more trustworthy than faces that looked at negative targets. However, the valence of the targets did not affect trustworthiness ratings in invalid and no-cue conditions. We suggest that integrated information about the predictability of the gaze cue and the valence of the gaze target modulates impressions about the personality of the face.

Trypophobic images induce oculomotor capture and inhibition.

It is known that unpleasant images capture our attention. However, the causes of the emotions evoked by these images can vary. Trypophobia is the fear of clustered objects. A recent study claimed that this phobia is elicited by the specific power spectrum of such images. In the present study, we measured saccade trajectories to examine how trypophobic images possessing a characteristic power spectrum affect visual attention. The participants' task was to make a saccade in the direction that was indicated by a cue. Four irrelevant images with different emotional content were presented as periphery distractors at 0 ms, 150 ms, and 450 ms in terms of cue-image onset asynchrony. The irrelevant images consisted of trypophobic, fearful, or neutral scenes. The presence of saccade trajectory deviations induced by trypophobic images suggest that intact trypophobic images oriented attention to their location. Moreover, when the images were phase scrambled, the saccade curved away from the trypophobic images, suggesting that trypophobic power spectra also triggered attentional capture, which was weak and then led to inhibition. These findings suggest that not only the power spectral characteristics but also the gist of a trypophobic image affect attentional deployment.

Trypophobic images gain preferential access to early visual processes.

Trypophobia is a common but unusual phobia that is induced by viewing many clustered objects. Previous studies suggested that this trypophobia is caused by the specific power spectrum of the images; this idea has not been fully investigated empirically. In the present study, we used breaking continuous flash suppression (b-CFS) to clarify whether the trypophobic images affect access to visual awareness, and what features of trypophobic images contribute to rapid access of awareness. In the b-CFS paradigms, a dynamic masking pattern presented to one eye suppresses the target images shown to the other eye. The participants' task was to indicate where the target image appeared in a dichoptic display through a mirror stereoscope. The target images consisted of trypophobic, fear-related, clusters or neutral images. The trypophobic images emerged into awareness faster than the other types of images. However, the phase-scrambled versions of the trypophobic images did not show any differences across the image types, suggesting that the trypophobic power spectra themselves did not affect access to awareness. Moreover, the phase-scrambled trypophobic images without CFS tended to be detected earlier than the phase-scrambled fearful and neutral images. These findings indicate that trypophobic power spectra might affect post-perceptual processing, such as response production.