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Do you fear snakes and spiders? Maybe it's just negative thinking |
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Snakes are just one animal people greatly fear |
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Dr Helena Purkis with some furry friends |
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You could walk into your house and find it a mess; there's red wine on your white carpet and your favourite vase is broken. Books are strewn across the floor. But instead of seeing the mess you notice something moving, a shadow in the corner. Suddenly you forget the debris across your living room because it's the snake, and only the snake, you see because you really hate snakes!
If a situation like this would cause you to have an immediate, negative, fear response, then you may be one of hundreds of thousands of Australians with some kind of phobia. It could be spiders or snakes that cause your blood to run cold, but it is your ability to only be affected by the snake and not the mess in your house that have University of Queensland (UQ) scientists fascinated about the causes of human phobias.
According to Dr Helena Purkis of UQ's School Of Psychology, the research they have conducted has unlocked new evidence that could help scientists to get to the bottom of our most common phobias and understand why creepy creatures such as snakes and spiders are so widely feared.
"Previous studies show we react differently to snakes and spiders than to other stimuli, such as flowers or mushrooms, or even other dangerous things like cars or guns, and in the past this has been explained by saying people are predisposed through evolution to fear certain things," she said. "It's our natural reaction to want to flee.
"However, at UQ we believe it's the fact that people are exposed to a lot of negative information about snakes and spiders that makes them more likely to be associated with phobia."
In the study, researchers compared the responses to stimuli of participants with no particular experience of snakes and spiders to those of snake and spider experts.
"What the research showed was that people who are inexperienced with snakes and spiders displayed a negative response as opposed to those who understood the creatures," said Helena.
The ability to see the snake in the house, despite the mess, is called preferential attention. What the research showed was a clear difference between preferential attention and the accompanying emotional response. That is, you can preferentially attend to something without a negative emotional response, as with the snake and spider experts.
"The study is the first to establish this clear difference between preferential attention and the accompanying emotional response," said Helena.
'What's really exciting is that the findings could significantly increase our understanding of the basic cognitive and emotional processes involved in the acquisition and maintenance of fear," she said.
"If we understand the relationship between preferential attention and emotion it will help us figure out how a stimulus goes from being perceived as potentially dangerous, to it eliciting a negative emotional response, and being associated with phobia.
"This information will ultimately help us better understand the way people need to deal with things like snakes and spiders in order to minimise negative and distressing emotional responses."
Helena is now planning a follow-up study which will test her theory that love, fear or phobia involve the same basic attention mechanism.
"I am interested in testing animal stimuli for animal lovers to see whether these stimuli, a dog for a dog breeder for instance, have access to preferential attention in the same way as snakes and spiders do for people with phobias of them," explained Helena.
"In addition, I am interested in the difference that we saw in our previous work between preferential attention and the emotional response that is elicited after this initial processing, and whether the same distinction is found with positive and negative stimuli."
The study needs several groups of volunteers consisting of people who: work with cats or dogs; are allergic to cats or dogs; are apprehensive of snakes or spiders; work with or own snakes or spiders: and those who have no fear of snakes and spiders but who do not explicitly work with them.
If you are interested in being involved please visit http://experiment.psy.uq.edu.au/fear/.
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A phobia is an irrational persistent fear of certain things, activities or situations.
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The key symptom is a strong and intense desire to avoid what is feared.
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If this fear causes problems in daily life it is often diagnosed as an anxiety disorder.
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Most clinicians put phobias into three categories: social phobia (fear of scrutiny by others); specific phobia (fear of spiders, snakes, dogs, lifts etc); and agoraphobia (general fear of leaving home resulting in panic attacks).
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Key treatments are medication, cognitive behavioural therapy and hypnotherapy.
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