Animal appeal: features underlying children’s attraction to animals

A growing body of evidence suggests that interacting with animals, owning a pet, as well as animal-based educational programs, have several benefits on children’s emotional and social development. In the context of the Biophilia framework it has been stated that humans possess a predisposition to be attracted by other species and several studies have shown animals to be powerful stimuli able to elicit positive responses, such an increase in attention, social behaviours and positive affect, even in children with social impairments. However, while research efforts have been dedicated to empirically confirm human ‘biophilic’ (and/or ‘biophobic’) predisposition and its emergence during development, very little attention has been paid to the identification of specific animal characteristics underpinning distinct behavioural responses in humans, particularly in children. The perception of certain similarities to human beings, the predictability of the behaviour, as well as the infantile appearance, appear to be the best candidates to form positive attitudes towards animals and to evoke affiliative responses, such as nurturing behaviour. However, previous research, including analyses on human attraction to certain animal features, did not consider children younger than 6 years. The general aim of the work presented in this thesis was to analyze both attitudes (i.e. preferences) and behavioural responses (i.e. gaze behaviour) towards animal stimuli presenting differential morphological characteristics (different animal species and animals with specific facial features) in 3-6 years old children, a population usually not addressed in the literature. In particular, in Chapter 2, we report about the impact of species’ philogenetic closeness to humans and domesticity in animal-related attitudes forming, while in Chapter 3 we show the effect of the presence of an infantile facial configuration (i.e. baby schema) on children’s perception of some animals, specifically of the most common pet animals (dogs and cats). Both these studies relied on the assessment of children’s explicit preferences for photographic stimuli depicting animals. Chapter 4 describes research in which a standardized set of stimuli and eye-tracking technologies were employed as a tool to deepen our knowledge of human perception of animals and to evidence the basic mechanism underlying motivation and preference. Both indirect (i.e. cuteness rating) and direct (i.e. visual attention) measures of preference show that the incentive salience of infantile traits might be a causal factor behind human attraction to animals, especially pets. However, the appeal of infantile features only partially explains why some animals have a powerful hold over human perception. Analyses of the effects of factors such as gender, age, pet ownership - described in Chapter 2, 3 and 4 - highlight the importance of human individual factors in modulating preferences towards animals and attitudes’ forming. Results are discussed considering the impact of this knowledge for different disciplines, such as environmental psychology, education and animal welfare, as well as for therapeutic and recreational programs.