Trypophobia, skin disease, and the visual discomfort of natural textures.

In the last decade, the behavioral sciences have described the phenomenon of trypophobia, which is the discomfort felt by some individuals when viewing images containing clusters of bumps or holes. One evolutionary hypothesis for this phenomenon is that this visual discomfort represents an adaptation which helps organisms avoid skin disease and/or ectoparasites. Even though trypophobic imagery and disease imagery are both examples of visual textures, to date there has been no comparison of the visual discomfort elicited by these two specific kinds of textures within the larger context of the visual comfort elicited by natural texture imagery more generally.