Nursery tale weaves fear of spiders

‘DOWN came a spider and sat down beside her and frightened Miss Muffet away’ runs the nursery rhyme.

Are women more frightened of spiders than men? David Rakison, a psychologist at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, thinks they are. Does women’s greater fear of snakes and spiders originate in infancy? is the title of a paper he published recently in the journal Evolution and Human Behaviour.

Phobias are common among both sexes, nor are the things feared by males and females that different; men are just as frightened of heights, flying or injections as women are. Snakes and spiders, however, produce widely differing reactions. Over 5% of Americans have phobias about snakes and 3% are scared of spiders, but these fears are four times more common among women and girls than among men and boys. Rakison thinks that fears are picked up from parental attitudes during childhood but, if so, why aren’t both sexes equally upset by creepy-crawly things? Have female infants, he asks, a more highly developed ‘fear mechanism’, one which makes them internalise parental fears more readily? To answer this question Rakison recruited 20, 11-month old infants. The babies in one group were shown photos of snakes and spiders accompanied by images of a happy human face. The babies in the other group were shown the same pictures except that an anxious face accompanied each picture. If babies develop fears through observing the responses of parents to the things they encounter, those who had seen the pictures associated with unhappy faces should have become more fearful. The two groups of babies were then shown images of mushrooms and flowers interspersed with some of snakes and spiders. The length of time they spent looking at the items appearing in the pictures was measured. The results were interesting.

Infants both male and female who had been shown happy faces, spent similar lengths of time examining the snakes and spiders in the second set of pictures. However, female infants who had previously been shown unhappy faces lingered for longer over the snake and spider images. They had learned to associate the negative facial expressions with these animals. However, male infants, irrespective of whether they had been shown fearful faces or not, spent much less time examining the new snake and spider pictures. This and similar experiments, Rakison believes, show that girls are predisposed to pick up on the reactions of their parents to objects and situations. Boys are much slower in doing so. But what could account for such differing responses? Phobias are not always bad; exaggerated fear can help protect us from genuine dangers. Poisonous snakes and, to a lesser extent, spiders can kill, so being hyper-vigilant where they are concerned makes sense. But this applies to men as well as women, so why are males less frightened?

The answer may lie in the traditional roles men and women assumed long ago. Before the rise of towns and cities, almost all women, some with babies on their backs, spent long hours foraging for berries fruit and roots in the countryside. They gathered firewood and disposed of waste. These activities exposed them to snakes and spiders lurking in the vegetation. Not only was a woman’s life at risk, so were those of her offspring. Infants and small children, until fairly recently, were unlikely to survive for long if their mother died.

Males, on the other hand, devoted much of their time to hunting. Defence of their families and communities was another male responsibility. Men had to compete for social position and access to females. All of these activities demanded a degree of indifference to danger. Risk-taking was essential if a male was to succeed in life and being too conscious of dangers would be a liability. Men put only their own lives at risk; if a man died any children he had fathered would probably still survive. Although hyper-vigilance regarding snakes might help to protect a male child, it would be a handicap in later life. If Rakison is right, the tale of Miss Muffet and her spider conceals a deeper truth.