I'm asking this, because I have once read a newspaper article about research showing that fear or disgust increase with the morphological difference of an animal to ourselves. This means e.g. the greater the difference in number of legs or the amount of fur, slimyness or similar differences to humans the greater fear and/or disgust in test persons.
However after hours of search I neither found the newspaper article nor made it to some original research, execept very specific themes e.g. only on spiders or another one about different reptiles. Again other papers only check some predefined classes of animals (e.g. predatory vs. non-predatory animals) for their fear or disgust effect on humans.
Maybe there's just some study observing such a correlation, maybe there's some meta analysis in this field, or, even better a research on the root cause of such a correlation, if it even exists?
So is there some proof for a correlation?
