Childhood fears
How creative activities may be a helpful approach towards negative attitudes and reactions during childhood towards elements of nature.
There was an old lady who swallowed a fly,
I don't know why she swallowed a fly – perhaps she'll die!
A nursery rhyme song, which I was surprised to learn only dates back to the 1940’s, tells the story of an old lady who tries to tackle the fly she swallowed by going on to eat a number of other animals to rid herself of the fly. Sadly, and perhaps unsurprisingly, this dietary strategy does not work out well and after eating a horse she passes away.
Insects feature in quite a few actions and rhyming songs for young children. I recall as a child liking Incy Wincy Spider, which is a bit odd thinking about it as I don’t really like spiders, as revealed in the last article. Insects also crop up in lots of children’s books, from the popular The Very Hungry Caterpillar and in films, such as A Bug’s Life.
Despite the cartoonish and cuddly nature of these creative formats, there is growing concern that children are not as engaged with nature as much as previous generations. This has been linked to increasing biophobia, when the term is used as a broad description of a negative emotional response and engagement towards nature. More specific biophobic reactions appear to originate during childhood, where negative experiences linked to fear and disgust towards certain animal or plant species may occur. This may influence behaviours into adulthood and psychological research has been considering ways of helping children to understand negative emotional responses to elements of nature, which in turn may also help with addressing a wider disconnect from nature.
Compassionate nature is a free reader supported publication. Please consider subscribing for free to support my writing and to never miss a weekly post. You don’t need to use Substack to subscribe, just an email address which will only ever be used to send each published article.
It is probably worth stressing that a negative reaction to an animal can be wholly appropriate. Should you come face to face with a crocodile putting your hand out to pat its head isn’t probably the best behavioural decision you could make. As discussed in the previous articles on biophobia, a response to an animal which is perceived as a threat or repulsive appears to be an evolved one that leads to an adaptive behaviour, such as avoidance. However, as highlighted with sharks and insects, the sense of fear or disgust may be disproportional which may result in harmful actions towards endangered species and can have negative impact to nature conservation programmes. In the studies included in the previous biophoba articles, it has been suggested that increased knowledge and education around the species that we may find more fearful or disgusting, such as insects, may help to address the elevated emotional response.
In this third and final article exploring biophobia, a trio of papers help to provide some insight into the emotional response of young children towards nature and suggest some ways to foster positive attitudes towards some less popular animals which may invoke that sense of fear or disgust.
Biophilia and biophobia in children
I usually tend to use studies from the last year or so, but I thought a 2020 paper by Pablo Olivos-Jara and a research team from Spain was a useful opening piece as it considered both biophilia and biophobia within 5 year-old children. The authors rationale for selecting this age group was that there was limited research of biophobia within it, while the children may not have had a lot of exposure to sociocultural influences towards certain animals. The paper covers two studies the team conducted.
In the first study, 94 children, aged 6 years or below, of whom the majority were boys, were shown images of natural landscapes and animals. To assess their emotional response the children were asked to select from emoticons indicating happiness, sadness, anger, fear or disgust. They were also asked about what the term nature meant to them. The overall results support the seemingly innateness of reactions to certain natural stimuli. Images such as flowers or penguins provided a happy response, sharks and snakes resulted in fear, while insects provoked disgust. Interestingly sadness appeared to relate to scorpions and cacti, while images of damage to a natural environment, for example a forest fire, resulted in anger, although this was the least reported emotion. There were varied responses to what nature meant to the children, which the authors collected into five categories - vegetation, animals (domestic and wild), innate (e.g. rain), bodies (e.g. the Moon) and built environment, including cars and school. I find it both interesting and worrying that some of the children identified urban stimuli as part of nature.
The second study followed a similar design with 39 children who had not taken part in the first study. This time the sample was almost an equal split of boys and girls, with an average age of around 5 years old. The children now had six emoticons to choose from in response to the same images used in the first study, with surprise being added. The authors added surprise as they wanted to explore if a sensation linked to awe or wonder may provide additional insight into the children’s responses. The analysis showed that landscapes were associated with happiness and surprise, while vertebrate animals were a mix of happiness and fear. Insects were also a mix of fear and happiness, but note the difference in the order of those emotions. The authors categorised the images into three types of the food chain - predators (e.g. fox) producers (e.g. flowers) and consumers (e.g. bee) - finding that fear correlated most with animals identified as predatory, producers correlated more with happiness, while consumers were a mix.
The results show that young children aged around 5 can identify characteristics within natural stimuli that are indicative of threat and repulsion, supporting the theory that negative emotional responses of fear or disgust are adaptive ones. However as those emotions may also result in being less likely to be interested or take action to protect parts of nature the challenge is how to foster more understanding towards those stimuli which invoke an innate negative response.
Hands on
A 2023 study from Slovenia by Marjanca Kos and colleagues explores further the attitudes of young children towards animals that can be labeled as unpopular and considers whether an education programme would help support more positive attitudes.
An experimental design study was used across two schools to assess if hands-on engagement with certain animals improved the children’s response towards them. One school, with 19 children (11 boys, 8 girls) was used as a control group, while the second school, again with 19 children (10 boys, 9 girls) was the experimental group. The children were aged between 5 and 6 years old. In both schools the children were presented with three animals, an earthworm, a mealworm beetle and a common toad. Their emotional reaction was measured by their response, for example whether they shied away or were happy to touch or hold the animal without any encouragement. In the experimental group the children had a programme of sessions incorporated into their existing curriculum within which one of the three animals was present, with the children encouraged through creative and art based activities to engage and learn about the animal. The control group did not have this change to their curriculum. After three months the children in both groups were presented with the three animals again and their reaction captured in the same way as the baseline. There was no change in the responses of the children in the control group, while the experimental group now showed very little negative response to the animals compared to before the educational programme, with the difference being of a large effect size. The exposure to the animals appeared to benefit the toad the most, who had initially elicited the most negative responses. No gender differences were noted and the creative activities linked with exposure to the animals appears to have helped reduce negative attitudes. The results are limited by the small sample sizes and it is not clear which of the creative activities may have been the most helpful. However the results do suggest that greater exposure coupled with creative ways to engage with animals that naturally elicit negative emotions can be helpful to support more understanding towards those animals. The authors also note anecdotal reports from teachers that the children in the experimental group appeared to show greater empathy and positive attitudes towards other natural stimuli alongside the three species included in the experiment.
Hands off
For some species regular handling may cause distress or harm, which includes snakes which can become stressed through contact. A UK study from 2023 by Sam Kelly and team also considered a creative arts based educational programme to help foster positive attitudes towards unpopular animals, in this case adders, using a non-contact approach. The study was held across three schools in south-west Wales, an area with large populations of adders, with two schools in the experimental condition and one school acting as a control. The overall sample consisted of 168 pupils aged between 8 to 11 years old, consisting of 77 boys and 91 girls. Across the three schools, baseline measures were taken of the children’s level of nature connection and attitudes towards adders using a measure developed for the study. Each pupil also selected the top three animals they would choose to help from a list of local endangered animals.
In the experimental group, the pupils took part in two workshops incorporated into their curriculum, with the first session focusing on the science around adders, while the second was an arts based session within which the pupils could depict adders in various formats, such as making adders from clay and contributing towards a local community arts project with lanterns decorated with adders. The control group of 57 pupils did not have this change to their curriculum.
The same measures from the baseline were taken six months after the programme had concluded. The children in the experimental group showed increases in wonder and interest towards adders, alongside increased sense of responsibility towards and enjoyment of nature. It is interesting that while three of the five dimensions on the attitudes towards adder measure improved within the experimental group, the levels of fear and dislike of adders did not change. The educational programme also elevated adders into second place of the top three animals to help from their sixth position at baseline. However it should be noted that in the control group the adder was already in the top three at both baseline and post measurement points, reflecting a limitation of the study due to its location. The school used as a control had a number of existing nature-based educational programmes which may have positively influenced results and so a replication of this study would benefit from a control school with perhaps less outdoor learning focus. The results are specific to adders, so the results may be different with other species and may not be reflective of changes in overall nature connectedness.
Despite those limitations, the study does show in a similar way to the Slovenian study that creative and arts based activities appear to help children engage with and learn about natural stimuli that they may prefer to avoid.
Little Miss Muffet
Sat on a tuffet,
Eating her curds and whey;
There came a big spider,
Who sat down beside her
And frightened Miss Muffet away
Maybe if little Miss Muffet had more chance to learn about or have greater contact with spiders she could have continued to enjoy her meal.
Susan Clayton and Gene Myers writing in the 2015 book Conservation Psychology suggested that there is more experimental evidence for biophobia, manifesting as fear or repulsion towards specific species, than there is for biophilia. As ever within psychology, I don’t think it is as straightforward as it may appear to say someone favours biophobia or biophilia more. While they have opposite meanings, both influence our attitudes and behaviour towards nature. When discussing increasing levels of biophobia, which research does suggest is occurring, we do have to be careful of conflating what appears to be a natural response to certain stimuli with the wider societal issue of a more general disconnect with nature. This is especially relevant alongside greater urbanisation, which may present people with less opportunity to connect with nature, while also bringing more potential opportunities for contact with less popular animals.
The studies suggest that engaging our interest with elements of nature which do provoke negative emotions, through factual information, opportunities to encounter and related creative activities, may help to influence more positive attitudes towards those elements, even if we still feel fear or disgust. Across the three Compassionate Nature articles on biophobia this has been shown via changes in language around sharks, the knowledge of and contact with insects, and via children’s education programmes which have employed art based activities to facilitate engagement.
Addressing negative emotional responses to specific species may also help to foster a positive, curious and appreciative attitude towards nature in all its forms, deepening a sense of nature connectedness which is important to help address the environmental issues that place many animals, popular and unpopular, at risk of extinction.
Thanks ever so much for reading this article from the Compassionate Nature research digest publication. If you think it would be helpful to someone else please do share on, it is a freely available public post.
I would also love to hear what you think, so please leave a comment, send me an email at TheCompassionateNatureHub@gmail.com or leave a reply if you see it via social media.
You can also support my work for free by subscribing to the publication and join over a hundred other subscribers in never missing a weekly post. You don’t need to use Substack to subscribe just an email address. Your support means a great deal as an aspiring writer - thank you.
References
Clayton, S. & Myers, G. (2015). Conservation Psychology. Wiley Blackwell
Kelly, S. J., Kelly, J. S., Gardner, E., Baker, J., Monk, C., & Julian, A. (2023). Improving attitudes towards adders (Vipera berus) and nature connectedness in primary‐age group children. People and Nature, 5(6), 1908-1921. https://doi.org/10.1002/pan3.10545
Kos, M., Jerman, J., & Torkar, G. (2023). Preschool children’s attitude toward some unpopular animals and formation of a positive attitude toward them through hands-on activities. Journal of Biological Education, 57(1), 83-100. https://doi.org/10.1080/00219266.2021.1877779
Olivos-Jara P, Segura- Fernández R, Rubio-Pérez C and Felipe-García B (2020) Biophilia and biophobia as emotional attribution to nature in children of 5 years old. Frontiers in Psychology, 11(511). https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2020.00511