Biophilia and Biophobia as Emotional Attribution to Nature in Children of 5 Years Old

Abstract

Introduction: Connectedness to nature is a concept that reflects the emotional relationship between the self and the natural environment, based on the theory of biophilia, the innate predisposition to the natural environment. However, the biophobic component has largely been ignored, despite, given its adaptive functional role, being an essential part of the construct. If there is a phylogenetic component underlying nature connectedness, biophilic, and/or biophobic, there should be evidence of this record from early childhood. The main aim of this study is therefore to describe the emotional attributions identified in 5 years old.

Methodology: Two studies were conducted. In the first, 94 children expressed their concept of nature and made basic emotional attributions to a set of 30 images of natural, using a software designed for the study. In the second, 39 children repeated the procedure and provided explanations for their responses.

Results: The main results show that, in general, children use both positive and negative emotions, which may be related to a three-dimensional model of emotional attributions to nature. The most widely attributed emotion is happiness. However, fear is the second most common attribution. The role of happiness could be explained by a feeling of security and familiarity, while the importance of fear in nature could show an adaptive response of the fear of wild nature in children. This interpretation could be confirmed when analyzing specifically the emotional attributions, classifying the images according to biological and ecosystemic criteria. Thus, for example, more emotional attributions are explained by the "pleasantness" attributed to primary producers and landscapes (e.g., flora), versus attributions of "harm" to the images of secondary and tertiary consumers (e.g., hunters).

Conclusion: These results provide evidence in favor of a didactic procedure to study emotional attributions to images of nature in preschool children. They suggest the incorporation of biophobia as an important adaptive factor in connectedness to nature and a tripartite emotional hypothesis based on the valences of the attributed emotions.

Keywords: biophilia; biophobia; children; connectedness; emoji; emotion; nature.

FIGURE 1

Some of the images of natural environments used in the emotional attribution test (Sánchez et al., 2012).

FIGURE 2

Emoticons from the response scale, emoticons reflecting happiness, sadness, anger, fear and disgust, in that order.

FIGURE 3

Images of a boy and a girl using the application on the touch screen laptop (written informed consent for publishing images available).

FIGURE 4

Correspondence analysis between concept of nature and emotional attribution in images of a natural environment.

FIGURE 5

Emoticons from the response scale, emoticons reflecting happiness, sadness, anger, fear, disgust and surprise, in that order.

FIGURE 6

Correspondence analysis between emotional attribution and predominant elements of nature.

FIGURE 7

Correspondence analysis between emotional attribution and food chain.