Arachnophobia

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Arachnophobia
Other namesArachnephobia [1]
Little Miss Muffet 2 - WW Denslow - Project Gutenberg etext 18546.jpg
Though most arachnids are harmless, a person with arachnophobia may still panic or feel uneasy around one. Sometimes, even an object resembling a spider can trigger a panic attack in an arachnophobic individual. The above cartoon is a depiction of the nursery rhyme "Little Miss Muffet", in which the title character is "frightened away" by a spider.
Pronunciation
Specialty Psychiatry
Treatment Exposure therapy [2]

Arachnophobia is the fear of spiders and other arachnids such as scorpions [3] and ticks. The word "arachnophobia" comes from the Greek words arachne and phobia.

Contents

Signs and symptoms

People with arachnophobia tend to feel uneasy in any area they believe could harbour spiders or that has visible signs of their presence, such as webs. If arachnophobes see a spider, they may not enter the general vicinity until they have overcome the panic attack that is often associated with their phobia. Some people scream, cry, have emotional outbursts, experience trouble breathing, sweat and experience increased heart rates when they come in contact with an area near spiders or their webs. In some extreme cases, even a picture, a toy, or a realistic drawing of a spider can trigger intense fear.

Reasons

Arachnophobia may be an exaggerated form of an instinctive response that helped early humans to survive [4] or a cultural phenomenon that is most common in predominantly European societies. [5]

Evolutionary

An evolutionary reason for the phobia remains unresolved. One view, especially held in evolutionary psychology, is that the presence of venomous spiders led to the evolution of a fear of spiders, or made the acquisition of a fear of spiders especially easy. However, there is no evidence that during the Pleistocene there were a sufficient number of venomous African spider fauna to trigger such an evolutionary fear. [6] Like all traits, there is variability in the intensity of fear of spiders, and those with more intense fears are classified as phobic. Being relatively small, spiders do not fit the usual criterion for a threat in the animal kingdom where size is a factor, but they can have medically significant venom and/or cause skin irritation with their setae. [7] However, a phobia is an irrational fear as opposed to a rational fear. [3]

By ensuring that their surroundings were free from spiders, arachnophobes would have had a reduced risk of being bitten in ancestral environments, giving them a slight advantage over non-arachnophobes in terms of survival.[ citation needed ] However, having a disproportionate fear of spiders in comparison to other, potentially dangerous creatures [8] present during Homo sapiens' environment of evolutionary adaptiveness may have had drawbacks.[ citation needed ]

In The Handbook of the Emotions (1993), psychologist Arne Öhman studied pairing an unconditioned stimulus with evolutionarily-relevant fear-response neutral stimuli (snakes and spiders) versus evolutionarily-irrelevant fear-response neutral stimuli (mushrooms, flowers, physical representation of polyhedra, firearms, and electrical outlets) on human subjects and found that ophidiophobia (fear of snakes) and arachnophobia required only one pairing to develop a conditioned response while mycophobia, anthophobia, phobias of physical representations of polyhedra, firearms, and electrical outlets required multiple pairings and went extinct without continued conditioning while the conditioned ophidiophobia and arachnophobia were permanent. [9]

Psychiatrist Randolph M. Nesse notes that while conditioned fear responses to evolutionarily novel dangerous objects such as electrical outlets is possible, the conditioning is slower because such cues have no prewired connection to fear, noting further that despite the emphasis of the risks of speeding and drunk driving in driver's education, it alone does not provide reliable protection against traffic collisions and that nearly one-quarter of all deaths in 2014 of people aged 15 to 24 in the United States were in traffic collisions. [10] Nesse, psychiatrist Isaac Marks, and evolutionary biologist George C. Williams have noted that people with systematically deficient responses to various adaptive phobias (e.g. arachnophobia, ophidiophobia, basophobia) are more temperamentally careless and more likely to receive unintentional injuries that are potentially fatal and have proposed that such deficient phobia should be classified as "hypophobia" due to its selfish genetic consequences. [11] [12] [13] [14]

A 2001 study found that people could detect images of spiders among images of flowers and mushrooms more quickly than they could detect images of flowers or mushrooms among images of spiders. The researchers suggested that this was because fast response to spiders was more relevant to human evolution. [15]

Cultural

An alternative view is that the dangers, such as from spiders, are overrated and not sufficient to influence evolution.[ attribution needed ] Instead, inheriting phobias would have restrictive and debilitating effects upon survival, rather than being an aid. For some communities, such as in Papua New Guinea and Cambodia, spiders are included in traditional foods. This suggests arachnophobia may, at least in part, be a cultural, rather than genetic trait. [16] [17]

Stories about spiders in the media often contain errors and use sensationalistic vocabulary, which could contribute to the fear of spiders. [18]

Treatments

The fear of spiders can be treated by any of the general techniques suggested for specific phobias. The first line of treatment is systematic desensitization  – also known as exposure therapy. [2] Before engaging in systematic desensitization, it is common to train the individual with arachnophobia in relaxation techniques, which will help keep the patient calm. Systematic desensitization can be done in vivo (with live spiders) or by getting the individual to imagine situations involving spiders, then modelling interaction with spiders for the person affected and eventually interacting with real spiders. This technique can be effective in just one session, although it generally takes more time. [19]

Recent advances in technology have enabled the use of virtual or augmented reality spiders for use in therapy. These techniques have proven to be effective. [20] It has been suggested that exposure to short clips from the Spider-Man movies may help to reduce an individual's arachnophobia. [21]

Epidemiology

Arachnophobia affects 3.5 to 6.1 percent of the global population. [22]

See also

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Phobia</span> Anxiety disorder classified by a persistent and excessive fear of an object or situation

A phobia is an anxiety disorder, defined by an irrational, unrealistic, persistent and excessive fear of an object or situation. Phobias typically result in a rapid onset of fear and are usually present for more than six months. Those affected go to great lengths to avoid the situation or object, to a degree greater than the actual danger posed. If the object or situation cannot be avoided, they experience significant distress. Other symptoms can include fainting, which may occur in blood or injury phobia, and panic attacks, often found in agoraphobia and emetophobia. Around 75% of those with phobias have multiple phobias.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Agoraphobia</span> Anxiety disorder

Agoraphobia is a mental and behavioral disorder, specifically an anxiety disorder characterized by symptoms of anxiety in situations where the person perceives their environment to be unsafe with no easy way to escape. These situations can include public transit, shopping centers, crowds and queues, or simply being outside their home on their own. Being in these situations may result in a panic attack. Those affected will go to great lengths to avoid these situations. In severe cases, people may become completely unable to leave their homes.

Specific phobia is an anxiety disorder, characterized by an extreme, unreasonable, and irrational fear associated with a specific object, situation, or concept which poses little or no actual danger. Specific phobia can lead to avoidance of the object or situation, persistence of the fear, and significant distress or problems functioning associated with the fear. A phobia can be the fear of anything.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Herpetophobia</span> Fear of reptiles

Herpetophobia is a common specific phobia, which consists of fear or aversion to reptiles, commonly lizards and snakes, and similar vertebrates as amphibians. It is one of the most diffused animal phobias, very similar and related to ophidiophobia. This condition causes a slight to severe emotional reaction, for example anxiety, panic attack or most commonly nausea. Herpetophobia is a common phobia and comes in many forms. Some people have fears of just looking at a reptile, some have fears of touching a reptile, and some cannot even stand knowing a reptile is in their space. Due to the specific type of phobia, there are no individual statistics for those who suffer from herpetophobia. Not everyone who is scared or has a fear of reptiles has herpetophobia.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ophidiophobia</span> Fear of snakes

Ophidiophobia, or ophiophobia, is fear of snakes. It is sometimes called by the more general term herpetophobia, fear of reptiles. The word comes from the Greek words "ophis" (ὄφις), snake, and "phobia" (φοβία) meaning fear.

Behaviour therapy or behavioural psychotherapy is a broad term referring to clinical psychotherapy that uses techniques derived from behaviourism and/or cognitive psychology. It looks at specific, learned behaviours and how the environment, or other people's mental states, influences those behaviours, and consists of techniques based on behaviorism's theory of learning: respondent or operant conditioning. Behaviourists who practice these techniques are either behaviour analysts or cognitive-behavioural therapists. They tend to look for treatment outcomes that are objectively measurable. Behaviour therapy does not involve one specific method, but it has a wide range of techniques that can be used to treat a person's psychological problems.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Fear of needles</span> Phobia of injections or needles

Fear of needles, known in medical literature as needle phobia, is the extreme fear of medical procedures involving injections or hypodermic needles.

Systematic desensitization, or graduated exposure therapy, is a behavior therapy developed by the psychiatrist Joseph Wolpe. It is used when a phobia or anxiety disorder is maintained by classical conditioning. It shares the same elements of both cognitive-behavioral therapy and applied behavior analysis. When used in applied behavior analysis, it is based on radical behaviorism as it incorporates counterconditioning principles. These include meditation and breathing. From the cognitive psychology perspective, cognitions and feelings precede behavior, so it initially uses cognitive restructuring.

Flooding, sometimes referred to as in vivo exposure therapy, is a form of behavior therapy and desensitization – or exposure therapy – based on the principles of respondent conditioning. As a psychotherapeutic technique, it is used to treat phobia and anxiety disorders including post-traumatic stress disorder. It works by exposing the patient to their painful memories, with the goal of reintegrating their repressed emotions with their current awareness. Flooding was invented by psychologist Thomas Stampfl in 1967. It is still used in behavior therapy today.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Randolph M. Nesse</span> American physician, scientist and author (born 1948)

Randolph Martin Nesse is an American physician, scientist and author who is notable for his role as a founder of the field of evolutionary medicine and evolutionary psychiatry.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Cynophobia</span> Fear of dogs and canines

Cynophobia is the fear of dogs and canines in general. Cynophobia is classified as a specific phobia, under the subtype "animal phobias". According to Timothy O. Rentz of the Laboratory for the Study of Anxiety Disorders at the University of Texas, animal phobias are among the most common of the specific phobias and 36% of patients who seek treatment report being afraid of dogs or afraid of cats. Although ophidiophobia or arachnophobia are more common animal phobias, cynophobia is especially debilitating because of the high prevalence of dogs and the general ignorance of dog owners to the phobia. The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-IV-TR) reports that only 12% to 30% of those with a specific phobia will seek treatment.

In psychology, preparedness is a concept developed to explain why certain associations are learned more readily than others. For example, phobias related to survival, such as snakes, spiders, and heights, are much more common and much easier to induce in the laboratory than other kinds of fears. According to Martin Seligman, this is a result of our evolutionary history. The theory states that organisms which learned to fear environmental threats faster had a survival and reproductive advantage. Consequently, the innate predisposition to fear these threats became an adaptive human trait.

Desensitization is a psychology term related to the treatment or process that diminishes emotional responsiveness to a negative or aversive stimulus after repeated exposure. This process typically occurs when an emotional response (feeling) is repeatedly triggered, but the action tendency associated with the emotion proves irrelevant or unnecessary.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ailurophobia</span> Fear of cats

Ailurophobia is the persistent and excessive fear of cats. Like other specific phobias, the exact cause of ailurophobia is unknown, and potential treatment generally involves therapy. The name comes from the Greek words αἴλουρος, 'cat', and φόβος, 'fear'. Other names for ailurophobia include: felinophobia, elurophobia, gatophobia, and cat phobia. A person with this phobia is known as an ailurophobe.

Accident-proneness is the idea that some people have a greater predisposition than others to experience accidents, such as car crashes and industrial injuries. It may be used as a reason to deny any insurance on such individuals.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Thalassophobia</span> Fear of the sea or large open water

Thalassophobia is the persistent and intense fear of deep bodies of water, such as the ocean, seas, or lakes. Though related, thalassophobia should not be confused with aquaphobia, which is classified as the fear of water itself. Thalassophobia can include fears of being in deep bodies of water, the vastness of the sea, sea waves, aquatic animals, and great distance from land.

The fear of falling (FOF), also referred to as basophobia, is a natural fear and is typical of most humans and mammals, in varying degrees of extremity. It differs from acrophobia, although the two fears are closely related. The fear of falling encompasses the anxieties accompanying the sensation and the possibly dangerous effects of falling, as opposed to the heights themselves. Those who have little fear of falling may be said to have a head for heights. Basophobia is sometimes associated with astasia-abasia, the fear of walking/standing erect.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Trypophobia</span> Fear or disgust of objects with repetitive patterns of small holes or protrusions.

Trypophobia is an aversion to the sight of repetitive patterns or clusters of small holes or bumps. Although not clinically recognized as a mental or emotional disorder, it may nonetheless be diagnosed as a specific phobia in habitually occurring cases of excessive fear or distress. Most sufferers normally experience mainly disgust when they see trypophobic imagery, although some experience equal levels of fear and disgust.

Evolutionary psychiatry, also known as Darwinian psychiatry, is a theoretical approach to psychiatry that aims to explain psychiatric disorders in evolutionary terms. As a branch of the field of evolutionary medicine, it is distinct from the medical practice of psychiatry in its emphasis on providing scientific explanations rather than treatments for mental disorder. This often concerns questions of ultimate causation. For example, psychiatric genetics may discover genes associated with mental disorders, but evolutionary psychiatry asks why those genes persist in the population. Other core questions in evolutionary psychiatry are why heritable mental disorders are so common how to distinguish mental function and dysfunction, and whether certain forms of suffering conveyed an adaptive advantage. Disorders commonly considered are depression, anxiety, schizophrenia, autism, eating disorders, and others. Key explanatory concepts are of evolutionary mismatch and the fact that evolution is guided by reproductive success rather than health or wellbeing. Rather than providing an alternative account of the cause of mental disorder, evolutionary psychiatry seeks to integrate findings from traditional schools of psychology and psychiatry such as social psychology, behaviourism, biological psychiatry and psychoanalysis into a holistic account related to evolutionary biology. In this sense, it aims to meet the criteria of a Kuhnian paradigm shift.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Snake detection theory</span> Evolutionary theory regarding primate vision

The snake detection theory, also sometimes called the snake detection hypothesis, suggests that snakes have contributed to the evolution of primates' visual system. According to the theory, predatory pressure from snakes has selected individuals who are better able to recognize them, improving their survival chances and therefore transferring such skill to their offspring. From this point of view, snakes were responsible for the modification and expansion of primate visual systems which made vision the most developed sensory interface with the external environment for modern primates. In her book The Fruit, the Tree, and the Serpent (2009), anthropologist Lynne Isbell writes that snakes evolved to be difficult to detect and mortally dangerous. Surviving the peril of snakes for millions of years required selective pressure favoring primates' specialized visual systems. Compared to that of other mammals, the pulvinar region of the brain – which helps to visually detect relevant objects – is disproportionately large and effective in the brains of primates.

References

  1. ↑ Patricia Bowen (ed.), Internal Medicine Words, Rayve Productions, 1997, p. 18.
  2. 1 2 Sperry, Len (2015). Mental Health and Mental Disorders: An Encyclopedia of Conditions, Treatments, and Well-Being [3 volumes]: An Encyclopedia of Conditions, Treatments, and Well-Being. ABC-CLIO. p. 430. ISBN   9781440803833.
  3. 1 2 "The Fear Factor: Phobias".
  4. ↑ Friedenberg, J.; Silverman, G. (2005). Cognitive Science: An Introduction to the Study of Mind . SAGE. pp.  244–245. ISBN   1-4129-2568-1 . Retrieved 2008-10-11.
  5. ↑ Davey, G.C.L. (1994). "The "Disgusting" Spider: The Role of Disease and Illness in the Perpetuation of Fear of Spiders". Society and Animals. 2 (1): 17–25. doi:10.1163/156853094X00045.
  6. ↑ Van Keer, Koen; Verhaeghe, Paul (2008). "Spider related psychology: possible causes and history of rejecting attitudes" (PDF). Nieuwsbrief van de Belgische Arachnologische Vereniging. 23 (1): 1.
  7. ↑ Isbister, Geoffrey; White, Julian (April 2004). "Clinical consequences of spider bites: recent advances in our understanding". Toxicon. 43 (5): 477–92. doi:10.1016/j.toxicon.2004.02.002. PMID   15066408 . Retrieved 7 December 2020.
  8. ↑ Gerdes, Antje B.M.; Uhl, Gabriele; Alpers, Georg W. (2009). "Spiders are special: fear and disgust evoked by pictures of arthropods" (PDF). Evolution and Human Behavior . 30: 66–73. doi:10.1016/j.evolhumbehav.2008.08.005. Archived (PDF) from the original on 2022-10-09.
  9. ↑ Öhman, Arne (1993). "Fear and anxiety as emotional phenomena: Clinical phenomenology, evolutionary perspectives, and information-processing mechanisms". In Lewis, Michael; Haviland, Jeannette M. (eds.). The Handbook of the Emotions (1st ed.). New York: Guilford Press. pp. 511–536. ISBN   978-0898629880.
  10. ↑ Nesse, Randolph (2019). Good Reasons for Bad Feelings: Insights from the Frontier of Evolutionary Psychiatry. Dutton. pp. 75–76. ISBN   978-1101985663.
  11. ↑ Nesse, Randolph; Williams, George C. (1994). Why We Get Sick: The New Science of Darwinian Medicine. New York: Vintage Books. pp. 212–214. ISBN   978-0679746744.
  12. ↑ Nesse, Randolph M. (2005). "32. Evolutionary Psychology and Mental Health". In Buss, David M. (ed.). The Handbook of Evolutionary Psychology (1st ed.). Hoboken, NJ: Wiley. pp. 911–913. ISBN   978-0471264033.
  13. ↑ Nesse, Randolph M. (2016) [2005]. "43. Evolutionary Psychology and Mental Health". In Buss, David M. (ed.). The Handbook of Evolutionary Psychology, Volume 2: Integrations (2nd ed.). Hoboken, NJ: Wiley. p. 1014. ISBN   978-1118755808.
  14. ↑ Nesse, Randolph (2019). Good Reasons for Bad Feelings: Insights from the Frontier of Evolutionary Psychiatry. Dutton. pp. 64–74. ISBN   978-1101985663.
  15. ↑ Öhman, A., Flykt, A., & Esteves, F. (2001). "Emotion drives attention: Detecting the snake in the grass". Journal of Experimental Psychology: 130 (3), 466–478.
  16. ↑ Wagener, Alexandra L.; Zettle, Robert D. (2011). "Targeting Fear of Spiders With Control-, Acceptance-, and Information-Based Approaches" (PDF). The Psychological Record. 61 (1): 77–91. doi:10.1007/BF03395747. S2CID   44385538. Archived from the original (PDF) on 2011-06-14.
  17. ↑ Ohman, A; Mineka, S (2001). "Fears, Phobias, and Preparedness: Toward an Evolved Module of Fear and Fear Learning" (PDF). Psychological Review. 108 (3): 483–522. doi:10.1037/0033-295X.108.3.483. PMID   11488376. Archived (PDF) from the original on 2022-10-09.
  18. ↑ Mammola, Stefano; et al. (2022). "The global spread of misinformation on spiders". Current Biology. 32 (16): R871–R873. doi: 10.1016/j.cub.2022.07.026 . hdl: 10400.3/6470 . PMID   35998593. S2CID   251727654.
  19. ↑ Ost, L. G. (1989). "One-session treatment for specific phobias". Behaviour Research and Therapy. 27 (1): 1–7. doi:10.1016/0005-7967(89)90113-7. PMID   2914000.
  20. ↑ Bouchard, S.; Côté, S.; St-Jacques, J.; Robillard, G.; Renaud, P. (2006). "Effectiveness of virtual reality exposure in the treatment of arachnophobia using 3D games". Technology and Healthcare. 14 (1): 19–27. PMID   16556961.
  21. ↑ Gabe Friedman (April 25, 2019). "Israeli Researchers: "Spider Man" movies decrease Spider Phobia". Arutz Sheva. Retrieved April 25, 2019.
  22. ↑ Schmitt, WJ; Müri, RM (2009). "Neurobiologie der Spinnenphobie". Schweizer Archiv für Neurologie. 160 (8): 352–355. Archived from the original on 23 August 2016.
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