Photographs reliably substitute live stimuli: beauty and emotions elicited by animal stimuli

Abstract Emotions elicited by live animals shape their direct psychological perception as well as public perception of their conservation, animals’ welfare and human mental health. Consequently, these fields urgently require reliable data concerning the emotions animals elicit. Although numerous studies provide such data, live animals are substituted with pictorial stimuli, raising questions about the results’ ecological validity. In this study, we compare ratings of 566 respondents, 237 of whom rated only animal photographs, 146 rated only live animals and 183 rated both. As stimuli, we used 62 invertebrate species and assessed ratings of their perceived beauty and evoked fear and disgust on a seven-point Likert scale. We found an exceptionally high correlation between mean scores of pictorial and live stimuli: 0.933 for fear, 0.898 for disgust and 0.892 for beauty. Surprisingly, though, pictorial stimuli elicited slightly higher fear and disgust than live animals. By incorporating the animal’s real body size, mean ratings of live stimuli can be predicted from picture ratings with up to 93% accuracy. Our results indicate that pictorial stimuli can reliably substitute live stimuli in studies assessing animal beauty and elicited emotions. This finding validates the conclusions of numerous prior investigations that relied exclusively on pictorial stimuli.