Animal Images Database: Validation of 120 Images for Human-Animal Studies
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Instituto Universitário de Lisboa (ISCTE-IUL), CIS-IUL, 1649-026 Lisboa, Portugal
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Instituto de Ciências Sociais da Universidade de Lisboa, 1600-189 Lisboa, Portugal
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CRC-W-Católica Research Centre for Psychological, Family and Social Wellbeing, 1649-023 Lisboa, Portugal
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Department of Psychology, Lancaster University, Lancaster LA1 4YW, UK
*
Author to whom correspondence should be addressed.
Animals 2019, 9(8), 475; https://doi.org/10.3390/ani9080475
Received: 13 June 2019 / Revised: 18 July 2019 / Accepted: 20 July 2019 / Published: 24 July 2019
Simple Summary
With the general goal of increasing knowledge about how individuals perceive and evaluate different animals, we provide normative data on an extensive set of open-source animal images, spanning a total of 12 biological categories (e.g., mammals, insects, reptiles, arachnids), on 11 evaluative dimensions (e.g., valence, cuteness, capacity to think, acceptability to kill for human consumption). We found that animal evaluations were affected by individual characteristics of the perceiver, particularly gender, diet and companion animal ownership. Moral attitudes towards animals were predominantly predicted by ratings of cuteness, edibility, capacity to feel and familiarity. We hope this free resource may help advance research into the many different ways we relate to animals.
There has been increasing interest in the study of human-animal relations. This contrasts with the lack of normative resources and materials for research purposes. We present subjective norms for a set of 120 open-source colour images of animals spanning a total of 12 biological categories (e.g., mammals, insects, reptiles, arachnids). Participants (N = 509, 55.2% female, MAge = 28.05, SD = 9.84) were asked to evaluate a randomly selected sub-set of 12 animals on valence, arousal, familiarity, cuteness, dangerousness, edibility, similarity to humans, capacity to think, capacity to feel, acceptability to kill for human consumption and feelings of care and protection. Animal evaluations were affected by individual characteristics of the perceiver, particularly gender, diet and companion animal ownership. Moral attitudes towards animals were predominantly predicted by ratings of cuteness, edibility, capacity to feel and familiarity. The Animal Images Database (Animal.ID) is the largest open-source database of rated images of animals; the stimuli set and item-level data are freely available online.
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Keywords:
human-animal relations; normative data; subjective ratings; diet; meat consumption; animal images
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This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited
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Externally hosted supplementary file 1
Doi: 10.17605/OSF.IO/MDPT6
Link: https://osf.io/mdpt6/
Description: Stimuli set (120 animal images) and item-level data.
MDPI and ACS Style
Possidónio, C.; Graça, J.; Piazza, J.; Prada, M. Animal Images Database: Validation of 120 Images for Human-Animal Studies. Animals 2019, 9, 475.
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