Abstract: Fear and disgust are different kinds of basic emotion. They differ in several ways, such as facial expressions, behavioral responses, biological responses, and subjective feelings. Considering these differences, it is expected that the stimuli to induce fear and disgust should be distinguished. Thus far, however, researchers have used the same stimuli to induce the two different emotions: The stimuli to induce fear can also induce disgust. And this is problematic, as the emotion of interest may not be properly induced, which can weaken the conclusions obtained. Therefore, it is necessary and valuable to develop materials to uniquely induce fear and disgust. In the current research, we conducted two experiments to develop a system of pictures that can specifically induce fear and disgust as experimental stimulus. In Experiment 1, we recruited 105 college students as participants. We first introduced them the definitions of fear and disgust and explained how they were differentiated. Thereafter, we asked them to write down as many things and scenes as possible that can induce their fear and disgust, separately. The responses should be concrete nouns that can only be associated with fear (e.g., snake) or disgust (e.g., vomit) but not both. For both fear and disgust, the responses were consolidated and classified into six categories by meaning. Thereafter, we selected 90 suitable pictures of the responses. The pictures were grouped into three categories: animals, scenes, and objects, there were 30 pictures in each category. In Experiment 2, eighty-four college students rated the pictures that were created in Experiment 1. A group of participants rated the pictures on valence and arousal, and the others rated the pictures on fear and disgust, on 9-point scales. Fifteen pictures were excluded based on preset criteria. The inter-rater reliabilities of the remaining 165 pictures were good to excellent. The 81 fear pictures and the 84 disgust pictures differed in the extent they induced fear or disgust: People rated the fear pictures more fearful than the disgust pictures, and they rated the disgust pictures more disgusting than the fear pictures. And, the system of pictures is identical in valance, but differed in arousal—people rated the fear pictures more arousal than the disgust pictures. Moreover, the three categories of pictures—animals, scenes, and objects—were compared between each other on how well they induced the different emotion. The results showed a significant effect of category on fear: People rated the animal pictures more fearful than the scene pictures. A significant effect of category was also found on disgust: The scene pictures induced more disgust than the animal and the object pictures. When inducing fear or disgust, past research failed to use appropriate stimuli: The stimuli used were able to induce both emotions instead of a particular one. Therefore, new, reliable stimuli that can uniquely induce fear or disgust should be established, which is beneficial and vital to the study of fear and disgust emotions as well as the treatment of the corresponding emotional disorders. In this research, we developed a system of pictures that can effectively specifically induce two kinds of different emotion: fear and disgust. As far as we know, the picture system we built up is the first stimulus system that can separately induce fear or disgust emotion. We believe that we have offered a useful tool to the research on fear and disgust, and we hope our stimuli can be validated and further improved in the future research.

Key words: fear, disgust, picture system

摘要： 基于恐惧与厌恶情绪刺激材料界定模糊的问题，实验一在总结前人研究中实验材料方面混淆恐惧和厌恶的基础上，通过问卷法完成了对恐惧与厌恶图片系统初步的搜集、整理工作；实验二通过进一步测评得到了具有良好信度的恐惧与厌恶情绪图片系统，图片系统中的恐惧与厌恶情绪很好的分离，且图片系统中动物、场景、物体三类图片的恐惧、厌恶程度均存在显著差异，可适用于需要不同种类情绪刺激的具体应用性研究。

关键词: 恐惧, 厌恶, 图片系统