Open biological negative image set

Abstract

Scientists conducting affective research often use visual, emotional images, to examine the mechanisms of defensive responses to threatening and dangerous events and objects. Many studies use the rich emotional images from the International Affective Picture System (IAPS) to facilitate affective research. While IAPS images can be classified into emotional categories such as fear or disgust, the number of images per discrete emotional category is limited. We developed the Open Biological Negative Image Set (OBNIS) consisting of 200 colour and greyscale creature images categorized as disgusting, fearful or neither. Participants in Experiment 1 ( N = 210) evaluated the images' valence and arousal and classified them as disgusting , fearful or neither. In Experiment 2, other participants ( N = 423) rated the disgust and fear levels of the images. As a result, the OBNIS provides valence, arousal, disgust and fear ratings and ‘disgusting,’ 'fearful' and ‘neither’ emotional categories for each image. These images are available to download on the Internet ( https://osf.io/pfrx4/?view_only=911b1be722074ad4aab87791cb8a72f5 ).