Fear of crime (FOC) is a rising social problem which is experienced at heightened levels by 15% of the population (Farrall & Gadd, 2004). Environmental factors are typically investigated as they consistently increase FOC (Scarborough et al., 2010). These are termed incivilities and examples include litter and graffiti which have both been shown to increase FOC (Pitner et al., 2012; Sreetheran & Van den Bosch, 2014). Eye tracking has recently been used to investigate FOC as it contributes more than what can be learnt from surveys such as dwell time on interest areas (Crosby & Hermens, 2018). The current research used 19 participants who viewed 20 images with graffiti edited into them and 20 original images without graffiti. For each image an interest area was created to measure fixation dwell time on graffiti. After viewing each image, a 1-7 Likert scale was presented to measure safety ratings. The State-Trait Anxiety Inventory (STAIT-5) was also given to all participants to investigate if this was correlated with FOC. Two 2X2 mixed ANOVAs were conducted revealing a main effect of graffiti on safety ratings and a main effect of fixation dwell time between the graffiti and non-graffiti conditions. No significant effects were found for STAIT-5 score and this was not significantly correlated with safety ratings. These results align with the literature that the presence of graffiti does increase FOC and attracts visual attention, the steps that should be taken to reduce this effect are discussed. However, the non-significant correlations of anxiety contradict the previous literature and possible explanations for this are discussed in detail. Future research should investigate other individual traits that may increase fear of crime such as depression.
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