Fig. 2

Visualisation of the redundancy analysis (RDA). Redundancy analysis (RDA) of the respondents’ gender (sex), age, level of education, biology background, score on the Snake Questionnaire (SNAQ) and two subscales of the Disgust Scale - Revised, i.e. core and animal reminder disgust as explanatory variables and answers on each item of the Spider Questionnaire (SPQ) as response variables. Yellow circles around the intersection of axes represents individual subjects, black triangles are SPQ items (1–31), which are distributed along the first major axis (RDA1). The second major axis (RDA2) seems to be significantly associated with disgust. Blue arrows signify the direction of explanatory variables’ effect; the longer the arrow, the stronger the effect (i.e. while responses on the SPQ items are positively correlated with the SNAQ, core disgust, and animal reminder disgust score, sociodemographic characteristics on the other hand, such biology background, higher education, older age, and male gender, have the opposite effect). The model explained 10.3% of the full variability