This post is also available in Dutch.
Recently, my colleagues and I decided to take our lunches outside. While we were discussing our weekend plans, a medium-sized spider landed on one of my colleagues jacket, who let out a shriek and nearly dropped her lunch – luckily, the lunch was safe, but the reaction spurred a conversation about spiders and the varying degrees of fear and disgust they elicit.
Arachnophobia
Fear of spiders is called Arachnophobia. When seeing a spider, an arachnophobe might feel uneasy, start sweating and experience their heart beating faster. In extreme cases, someone might not be able to enter a room with a spider in it or abstain from spending time outdoors out of fear. While not all of us are full blown arachnophobes, most people don’t particularly like spiders, either. And we seem to like them less than other bugs: In a study researcher Antje Gerdes showed pictures of spiders and other bugs to a group of 76 psychology students. The results: spiders are indeed rated significantly higher in terms of fear, dangerousness, and disgust.
Causes
Why are spiders so special? Typically, a specific phobia is explained through the acquisition of a fear response during a negative event (called “classical conditioning”, when a stimulus is coupled with a fear response) which is upheld through the continued avoidance of the stimulus (“operant conditioning”).
In addition, there might be an evolutionary mechanism at play: The “preparedness-hypothesis” states that certain fears are innate or at least can be learned easily. Not all children are afraid of spiders when they are born, but even just watching a fearful caregiver can make them afraid, and the fear takes longer to extinguish than other fears. This isn’t true for other bugs.
However, we don’t entirely know why arachnophobia is so common – researchers suspect it might be a mixture of preparedness, learned behaviours and cultural reinforcement through media (think Shelob in Lord of the Rings or Aragog in Harry Potter). What we do know is that fear in any specific phobia, when not dealt with, sets off a sensitization process in the amygdala. This is a part of the brain roughly the size of an almond known as the fear centre of the brain. Repeated exposure to the same fear stimulus can lead to a lower activation threshold for the amygdala.
Treatment of Arachnophobia
You might have heard of exposure therapy – basically, exposing yourself to your fear can quench it. So is repeated exposure good or bad? The key is that the exposure must be coupled with successfully overcoming your fear – otherwise it will just entrench it more deeply through the sensitization process. Removing a spider yourself rather than relying on others teaches your brain the fear is manageable.
This held true for my colleague – eventually she decided she wanted to deal with her fear. She started watching videos on YouTube: spider enthusiasts filming themselves showing off their spiders while teaching viewers about them. Gradually, she became interested rather than scared – and today, she can easily remove a spider in her house if she wants to.
- Author: Zoé
- Buddy: Charlotte Sachs
- Editor: Elena Markantonakis
- Translation: Dirk-Jan
- Editing translation: Dirk-Jan
Photo by Julian Schultz on Unsplash
