Behav. Res. Ther . Vol. 32, No. I, pp. 57’43, 1994 00057967/ 94 $6.00 + 0.00 Printed in Great Britain. All rights reserved Copyright 0 I993 Pergamon Press Ltd DISEASE-AVOIDANCE MODEL: FACTOR ANALYSIS OF COMMON ANIMAL FEARS JACQUELINE WARE,’ KUMUD JAIN,’ IAN BURGESS’ and GRAHAM C. L. DAVEY’* ‘Psychology Division, The City University, London, U.K. and rDepartment of Clinical Psychology, Prestwick Hospital, Manchester, U.K. (Received 2 December 1992) Summary-This paper reports the results of two studies investigating a disease-avoidance model of common animal fears. In Study 1, a factor analysis of a variety of self-rated animal fears revealed that these fears can be grouped into two theoretically meaningful categories which correspond to predatory animals and fear-relevant animals. Study 2 found a significant correlation between disgust sensitivity and fear to animals in the fear-relevant category, but not between disgust sensitivity and fear to animals in the predatory category. In addition, fear of animals in the fear-relevant category was significantly associated with scores on the obsessive washing sub-scale of the Maudsley Obsessive-Compulsive Inventory, but was not associated with obsessive behaviour in general. A number of recent studies have demonstrated that there appears to be a close relationship between some common animal fears and the food-rejection response of disgust. In an initial study, Davey (1992) found that self-reported fear of animals normally considered to be fear-relevant (i.e. animals that are considered to be fear-evoking but normally physically harmless, e.g. rat, spider, snake, cf. Bennett-Levy & Marteau, 1984, for a fuller description of the criteria for such animals) co-varied significantly with self-reported fear of animals that are normally considered to evoke disgust (e.g. snail, slug, maggot). This suggested that there may be some common factor, such as disgust, underlying reported fear in these two groups of animals. In a related study, Matchett and Davey (1991) found that measures of disgust and contamination sensitivity were significantly correlated with measures of fear of both fear-relevant animals and disgust-relevant animals, but not with fear of animals normally considered to be predatory and likely to attack and physically harm human beings (e.g. shark, tiger, lion, bear). In addition, disgust sensitivity scores were significantly correlated with scores on the animal phobias sub-scale of the Fear Survey Schedule (FSS), implying that at least some clinical animal fears may be driven by disgust and fear of contamination. A number of other studies have identified more specifically the role that disgust plays in common animal fears. For instance, in substantiating the involvement of disgust in common animal fears, Davey (1993a) has shown that normal Ss tend to rate fear-relevant animals as equally disgust- evoking as animals which naturally elicit disgust (e.g. caterpillar, worm, snail, maggot, frog, slug), and more disgust-evoking than predatory animals. Using factor analysis, this study also demon- strated that fear of fear-relevant animals co-varied with feelings of disgust and in many cases co-varied with the tendency to associate the animal with dirt and disease. In contrast, fear of predatory animals did not co-vary with the tendency to associate the animal with disgust, dirt and disease, but only with the tendency to associate the animal with physical harm. In an attempt to discover the causal nature of the relationship between disgust sensitivity and fear of fear-relevant animals, Webb and Davey (1993) measured Ss’ fear of a variety of animals both before and after three different treatment conditions. The Ss watched either (i) a video depicting extreme violence, (ii) a video depicting revulsive scenes from a hospital operation, or (iii) a video showing neutral landscape scenes. The results showed that exposure to violent material produced an increase in fear ratings only to animals normally considered predatory (e.g. lion, tiger, shark). In contrast, exposure to revulsive material produced an increase in fear ratings only to animals in the fear-relevant (e.g. rat, spider, snake) or disgust-evoking (e.g. slug, snail, maggot) *Author for correspondence.