Affective Responses to Natural and Technological Disasters; An Evolutionary Perspective

Anecdotal reports indicate more severe psychological distress following technological catastrophes in comparison to natural disasters. Previous research also suggests a more negative evaluation of the outcomes of disasters if they are manmade. On the other hand, evolutionary neuroscience shows differential neural processing of ancient and modern threats. Building upon this literature, we probed valence and arousal ratings of stimuli depicting natural and technological disasters in several standardized affective stimuli datasets used in neuroscience and psychological research. Our results show that while technological disasters are rated as slightly less arousing than natural disasters they are rated as significantly more unpleasant. The evolutionary age of disasters plays an important role in emotional experiences invoked by these threats which might affect our evaluations of catastrophes. We discuss how evolutionary psychology might explain our findings and help us to better understand the biological and learned roots of our biases in risk perception.