Abstract
Although there is a tremendous variety of images that elicit negative emotion, the causes of the emotion are quite different. Trypophobia is the fear of clustered objects, such as lotus seed heads. Cole & Wilkins (2013) concluded that the images inducing trypophobia have unique characteristics in spatial frequency properties. In the present experiment, we measured saccade to examine whether trypophobic images would affect attentional processes in a different manner from those of fearful and neutral images. Participants’ task was to make a saccade in the direction that was indicated by a cue while presenting four images as distractor in the periphery. The results showed that the endpoints of the saccades were deviated toward a location of a trypophobic image, compared with the other types of images, suggesting that the physical characteristics of trypophobic images affect attentional processes differently from the other kinds of emotional images.
