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Arachnophobia
Additional recommended knowledgeThe fear of spiders can be treated by any of the general techniques suggested for specific phobias. Arachnophobia is, in many cases, the result of a traumatizing encounter with spiders in one's early childhood, though the experience may not be remembered[citation needed]. An evolutionary reason for the phobias, such as arachnophobia, claustrophobia, fear of snakes or mice, etc. remains unresolved. One view, especially held in evolutionary psychology, is that the presence of venomous spiders led to the evolution of an innate fear of spiders or made acquisition of a fear of spiders especially easy. Like all traits, there is variability in the intensity of fears of spiders, and those with more intense fears are classified as phobic. Spiders, for instance, being relatively small, don’t fit the usual criterion for a threat in the animal kingdom where size is a factor, but most species are venomous (although many of the poisons produced by these species having no effect on humans), and some are lethal. Arachnophobes will spare no effort to make sure that their whereabouts are spider-free, hence they would have had a reduced risk of being bitten in ancestral environments. Therefore, arachnophobes may possess a slight advantage over non-arachnophobes in terms of survival. However this theory is undermined by the disproportional fear of spiders in comparison to other, far more deadly creatures that were present during Homo sapiens' environment of evolutionary adaptiveness. The alternative view is that the dangers, such as from spiders, are overrated and not sufficient to influence evolution. Instead, inheriting phobias would have restrictive and debilitating effects upon survival, rather than being an aid. For example, there are no deadly spiders native to central and northern Europe that could exert an evolutionary pressure, yet that is where the strongest fear for spiders began, suggesting cultural learning. In contrast, many non-European cultures generally do not fear spiders, and for some communities such as in Papua New Guinea and South America (except Chile), spiders are included in traditional foods. References
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This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "Arachnophobia". A list of authors is available in Wikipedia. |