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Specific phobias have been postulated both to result from learning and to possibly having evolutionary mechanisms. Some individuals experience an unusual aversion to certain visual configurations of holes — e.g., lotus-seed heads, holes in aerated chocolate, and pockets of soap bubbles. This phenomenon, trypophobia (“fear of holes”), has generated Internet support groups and a Facebook site; in a preliminary survey, 11% of men and 18% of women agreed that such images were “uncomfortable or even repulsive to look at.” These researchers analyzed the chromatic and luminance contrasts of similar images.
Aversive images were found to display higher degrees of visual contrast at midrange spatial frequencies (cycles per image) than nontrypophobic i…