What looks dangerous? Reliability of anxiety and harm ratings of animal and tool visual stimuli

Abstract

Background Visual stimuli are integral to psychology and cognitive neuroscience research, with growing numbers of image repositories tagged with their affective information like valence and arousal. However, more specific affective domains such as anxiousness and harm have not been empirically examined and reported for visual stimuli, despite their relevance to task paradigms investigating common psychiatric disorders like anxiety and obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). Methods In this study, we asked N = 80 participants to assess a set of 42 unique visual stimuli consisting of a variety of animals and tools on anxiety and harm scales. We then assessed the ratings’ psychometric properties. Results We found that animals were generally rated as more harm-perceiving and anxiety-inducing than tools, and were also higher in their inter-rater and test-retest reliabilities. Conclusions With this, we provide a database of affective information for these stimuli, which allows for their use in affective task paradigms using psychometrically validated visual stimuli.