Human Skin Resistance Responses to Ancestral and Modern Threat Stimuli

119 participants' skin resistance recordings and fear ratings were collected in response to photos of venomous snakes, heights, airborne diseases, and firearms. The dataset, authored by Iveta Štolhoferová and last updated in March 2026, shows the most frequent reactions were to heights, followed by snakes, firearms, and airborne diseases. Results indicate a link between higher subjective fear ratings and an increased probability of skin resistance change.

Use Cases

• Modeling the relationship between subjective fear ratings and physiological response probability based on the described correlation.
• Comparing physiological response intensity (amplitude) between ancestral (snakes, heights) and modern (firearms, diseases) threat categories.
• Analyzing the frequency of skin resistance changes across different threat stimulus categories mentioned in the study.

Strengths

• Includes data from 119 human participants.
• Contains both physiological (skin resistance) and subjective (fear rating) measurements for each stimulus.
• Released under a permissive CC-BY-4.0 license.

Limitations

• Row count and column-level documentation are unknown, requiring manual inspection after download.
• The dataset is very small at 19.6 KB, indicating limited scope.

Provenance

Source

Iveta Štolhoferová via figshare.

Collection Method

Experimental recordings collected from participants exposed to threat category photos.

Time Range

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Freshness

Last updated 2026-03 18 17:23:40.

Geography

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