Interaction Studies : (), –.  ./is...tin  – / - – © John Benjamins Publishing Company Is the uncanny valley a universal or individual response? Angela Tinwell University of Bolton, UK Keywords: Uncanny Valley; human-like characters; realism; perception; facial expression; anti-social-personality-disorders; psychopathy; narcissism Empirical studies have established that our ainity towards a synthetic agent does not increase when the agent is crated with the intention to persuade us that it is human in its appearance and behaviour (MacDorman, 2005; MacDorman & Entezari, this volume). his increased negative afective response to a human- like agent was presumed a universal corollary, as the agent failed to satisfy our expectations of normal human behaviour (Mori, 1970/2012). Visualization tasks in infants of up to 12 months old (Lewkowicz & Ghazanfar, 2012) and monkeys (Steckeninger & Ghazanfar, 2009), on normal to synthetic faces, lend support that uncanniness is evolutionary in origin. herefore, as well as developing traits that make us more discerning of human-like agents, we are born with instinctive behaviours to reject uncanny agents. MacDorman and Entezari (this volume) explored the supericial traits in healthy individuals that may exaggerate percep- tion of the uncanny, yet, perception of the uncanny may also be considered from a less cursory to a more fundamental basis in humans that negate the human norm. As well as having established how particular traits may exaggerate the uncanny in individuals, the indings in MacDorman and Entezari’s (this volume) paper may be considered from another perspective, to consider which particular biological and learned traits may render an individual devoid of experience of the uncanny. . Uncanny fear MacDorman and Entezari (this volume) acknowledged in their paper that the emotion fear drives perception of the uncanny and we are hard wired to avoid