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Are we afraid of spiders as a taxonomical group or is their categorisation unimportant?

When you react to a stimulus, neural pathways that enable various responses to different situations are created. The neural circuits responsible for these quick reactions are one of the oldest we possess and mediate responses that are among the fastest. The question is, how deeply is the fear of spiders imprinted within us? Is it a result of natural selection, learning, and reflexes or are there other reasons for this common phobia? Even newborns react negatively to spiders and children aged 9 to 13 respond more negatively to crawling invertebrates than those that fly. There has to be a reason for this! Research into the fear of spiders and other creatures is moving forward thanks to Eva Landová, Markéta Janovcová, and Professor Daniel Frynta’s team from the Faculty of Science, Charles University.

This group of scientists conducted an experiment where participants rated invertebrates on the following categories: fear and disgust. The species they focused on, including crustaceans, insects, and other morphologically diverse animals, enabled them to investigate whether spiders form a special cognitive category that is evaluated separately in our decision making.

As humans, we strive to simplify the processing of stimuli and this is why we create cognitive categories that help us react to both known and unknown situations. If we have had a negative experience with spiders in the past and then encounter one, our reaction is probably going to be reserved, cautious, and maybe fearful. This is because of our previous experience. However, it has been found that people without any negative memory of spiders react to them in a very similar way – with fear.

Species of spiders used in the study. source: the original article

The explanation for this could be preexisting clusters of species’ features, which are supposed to warn us of danger that we do not yet know about whereas our ancestors did, and that information is somehow stored within us. Disgust has a similar function. This is not just a joke played on children who do not like broccoli or mushrooms. It is a complex and very extensive defence mechanism against pathogens and other substances that we might eat and be poisoned by. Avoiding both possible and real carriers of these pathogens, which can include some animals, is extremely important. Although fear is the main emotion we experience when responding to spiders, disgust also plays an important role. The experiment conducted by the research team identified a correlation between fear and disgust which means that when someone is afraid of something, they will usually find it disgusting as well. This link is demonstrated by in the fact that out of 25 pictures with spiders, people responded to 18 of them with a score above average in disgust and 21 with a score above average in fear.

So why are people afraid of spiders? It cannot be said that their fear is justifiable, because most spiders are not dangerous at all! Nevertheless, spiders were ranked in seventh place of the top ten of animals people feared the most. The reason for this might be that when a cognitive category is created, the taxonomical placing of a species is not important. Our defence mechanism does not care whether the thing in front of us is a spider or other Chelicerata – all of them are put into one category and the more they look like spiders, the easier it is. Other invertebrates we fear, apart from spiders and those similar to them, are myriapods. When an animal resembles a spider, people are usually more afraid so it does not matter where it belongs taxonomically. This is the reason why, when speaking about fear, we cannot use the term “spiders”, but have to use a broader term “spider-like” which characterises what people are actually afraid of.

The black widow (Latrodectus mactans). source: Wikipedia, autor: tinyfroglet (Flickr)

However, spiders not only elicited negative reactions in people with a phobia or high level of fear. Even people with absolutely no fear exhibited at least slight discomfort when looking at a spider and created the same cognitive categories as fearful participants in that context. The only difference was that the emotions that were elicited were weaker.

The research team found that people who are afraid of spiders, including those who are phobic and highly fearful, perceived spiders very similarly to everyone else. Although the intensity of fear differed, they concurred as to which spider was the most terrifying, which was the most disgusting, and which were the most similar. On the other hand, people who were not afraid of spiders at all assessed them completely differently. It seems that they used different criteria than the rest of the participants. Furthermore, they agreed among themselves much less, so with a little exaggeration one could say that what is unusual is not people who are afraid of spiders, but people who actually like them.

Eliška Leštinová

https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0257726 

Published: Mar 07, 2022 07:40 PM

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