Assessment of trypophobia and an analysis of its visual precipitation

We developed and validated a symptom scale that can be used to identify “trypophobia”, in which individuals experience aversion induced by images of clusters of circular objects. The trypophobia questionnaire (TQ) was based on reports of various symptom types, but it nevertheless demonstrated a single construct, with high internal consistency and test–retest reliability. The TQ scores predicted discomfort from trypophobic images, but not neutral or unpleasant images, and did not correlate with anxiety. Using image filtering, we also reduced the excess energy at midrange spatial frequencies associated with both trypophobic and uncomfortable images. Relative to unfiltered trypophobic images, the discomfort from filtered images experienced by observers with high TQ scores was less than that experienced with control images and by observers with low TQ scores. Furthermore, we found that clusters of concave objects (holes) did not induce significantly more discomfort than clusters of convex objects (bumps), suggesting that trypophobia involves images with particular spectral profile rather than clusters of holes per se.     

The shape of holes

The shape of holes can be recognized as accurately as the shape of objects (Palmer, S. E. (1999). Vision science: photons to phenomenology. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press), yet the area enclosed by a hole is a background region, and it can be demonstrated that background regions are not represented as having shape. What is therefore the shape of a hole, if any? To resolve this apparent paradox, we suggest that the shape of a hole is available indirectly from the shape of the surrounding object. We exploited the fact that observers are faster at judging the position of convex vertices than concave ones (Perception 30 (2001) 1295), and using a figural manipulation of figure/ground we found a reversal of the relative speeds when the same contours were presented as holes instead of objects. If contours were perceived as belonging to the hole rather than the surrounding object then there would have been no qualitative difference in responses to the object and hole stimuli. We conclude that the contour bounding a hole is automatically assigned to the surrounding object, and that a change in perception of a region from object to hole always drastically changes the encoded information. We discuss the many interesting aspects of holes as a subject of study in different disciplines and predict that much insight especially about shape will continue to come from holes.     

Porous skin: Breathing through the prism of the holey body

The skin is a body's largest organ and both a metaphor and a materiality. It constitutes a person's exteriority through which and on which social meaning is negotiated and constructed. My contribution challenges the modern idea of the skin's imagined solidity and fixity by returning to an older set of ideas that approach the body as porous, relational, ambiguous and atmospheric. The thought of a body that is open, holey from both the inside and the outside, atmospheric, strikes against culturally constructed and carefully policed myths and norms of groundedness and boundedness. Porosity, however, has not always been feared in that way. My paper explores the ways in which older, speculative thought celebrated the skin's ability to mingle corporally with air, wind and world. This radical openness affectively and materially ‘ungrounds’ seemingly familiar feelings and expectations of order, sense and stability. I wish to retrieve some of this original thinking, which approaches the body not as surface but through its glands, crevices, pores and holes that blur dichotomies of inside and outside. The purpose is to offer an embodied and relational politics that starts from a breathable skin that makes emotion and affect more contingent on the body's holey relationship to air and atmosphere.