Is the Uncanny Feeling Disappearing?

During research of a recent essay, I stumbled upon a research study in which researchers studied the uncanny feeling in a psychological manner. (Another interesting aspect of this study that I will not be focusing on in this blog post is that the researchers tested to see if there was a link between reactions to the uncanny and psychopathy). The uncanny stimuli used in this study is android faces. I do wish they would have gone more in-depth regarding what these faces looked like or even provided pictures for us readers to view ourselves. We can, however, assume that these were computer-generated human-like faces. When the subjects viewed this stimuli they had to say whether they experienced fear, disgust, moral disgust, etc. when looking at the android faces. Where the study gets interesting, though, is in the results portion. Though most all of the participants noted that the faces were creepy or unlikeable/unfriendly looking, showing that they had a good gauge of normal facial expressions or social cues, they did not link the uncanny stimuli to fear or disgust and there was only a very small connection between the uncanny feeling and what they call moral disgust. This begs the question of, is the uncanny feelings disappearing? And if so, what has caused that? 

Seeing as this study was published just last year, we can assume that much of the modern literature and film that produces potential uncanny feelings had already been made. This makes one wonder if there is some link to desensitization to the uncanny because of exposure to uncanny stimuli in the media.

Study citation: Villacampa, Javier, et al. “Applying an Implicit Approach to Research on the Uncanny Feeling.” Journal of Articles in Support of the Null Hypothesis, vol. 16, no. 1, July 2019, pp. 11–22. EBSCOhost, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=aph&AN=138165591&site=ehost-live.