The relationship between neuroticism, current affect, past contact with dogs and fear of dogs

Abstract

The purpose of the study was to examine the relationship between neuroticism, current affect, past contact with dogs and fear of dogs, with a hope to enhance the understanding of this specific fear. A mixed, experimental and correlational within-subjects design was used on a convenience sample of 33 participants. Participants’ GSR was measured while exposing them to a series neutral and dog images. The GSR response to dog images was significantly higher than that to neutral pictures; the difference between the two was used as a physiological indicator of ‘fear’ in the correlational analysis. Neuroticism was measured by The Big Five Inventory (John, Srivastava, 1999); current affect was measured by PANAS (Watson, Clark, Tellegen, 1988); past exposure to dogs was measured by a Semantic Differential. Whilst there was no significant association between ‘fear’ and the 3 psychological factors, the power of the tests was too low to reject the hypotheses. Author keywords: fear of dogs, specific fear, fear of animals, neuroticism, negative affect, past exposure to dogs