期刊名称：International Journal of Comparative Psychology
印刷版ISSN：0889-3667
出版年度：2012
卷号：25
期号：2
页码：83-96
出版社：University of California Press
摘要：Zoo animals were tested to see if they perceived the scary nature of Halloween masks, using a procedure that measured the avoidance response latency to take food from a masked human experimenter.Human perception of the masks was also assessed using a rating scale, with results showing that a Bill Clinton mask was rated not scary, while a Vampire mask was rated very scary.Animal results showed that primate latencies correlated significantly with the human ratings, while non-primate latencies did not.Taken together, these results indicate that human perception of scary faces does not depend upon human-specific cultural factors, e.g., belief in the supernatural.Rather, it has a more biological basis, shared specifically with other primates, by which scary faces are perceived as predators or threatening conspecifics.
