The sight of eight long black legs crawling slowly over the floor can make some people scream and run – and women are four times as likely to take fright than men. Now a study suggests that females are predisposed to develop fears for potentially dangerous animals.
David Rakison, a developmental psychologist at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, carried out an initial training phase in which he showed 10 girls and 10 boys, who were all 11 months old, a picture of a spider together with a fearful face. He then showed them test images of a spider paired with a happy face, and a flower paired with a fearful face. The girls looked significantly longer at the former than the latter, which Rakison interprets as evidence that the girls expected spiders to be linked with fear. The boys looked for an equal time at both pairs of images, which suggests they had not learned to associate spiders with fear.
When Rakison accustomed a different set of babies to a spider and a happy face, or a flower and a fearful face, the girls, like the boys, looked at both test images for the same length of time (Evolution and Human Behavior, ).
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According to Rakison, the study shows that girls, more than boys, have a deep-rooted ability to learn to fear dangerous animals. Modern phobias, like fear of flying or injections, show no sex difference, he says.