Nursery tale weaves fear of spiders
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.
