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The Effect of Gender, Age, Education, and Disgust on Spider Phobia

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The Effect of Gender, Age, Education, and Disgust on Spider Phobia Measuring Fear Evoked by the Scariest Animal: The Effect of Gender, Age, Education, and Disgust on Spider Phobia Jakub Polák ( [email protected] ) National Institute of Mental Health Kristýna Sedláčková National Institute of Mental Health Markéta Janovcová Charles University Šárka Peléšková Charles University Jaroslav Flegr Charles University Barbora Vobrubová Charles University Daniel Frynta Charles University Eva Landová National Institute of Mental Health Research Article Keywords: animal phobia, arachnophobia, disease avoidance, DS-R, fear of spiders, psychometric analysis, SBQ, SPQ, test translation Posted Date: August 20th, 2021 DOI: https://doi.org/10.21203/rs.3.rs-827887/v1 License: This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. Read Full License Page 1/26 Abstract Background: Although tiny in size and mostly harmless, spiders evoke exceptional fear in a signicant part of the population and arachnophobia belongs to one of the most common anxiety disorders with prevalence 2.7-6.1%. Two standardized psychometrics have been widely used to reliably assess the emotional and cognitive component of spider fear, the Spider Questionnaire (SPQ) and Spider Phobia Beliefs Questionnaire (SBQ). Methods: In Study 1, we developed a Czech translation of both scales using a back-translation procedure and then tested their psychometric properties against their English versions in a counterbalanced experimental design using the Mann-Whitney U test and two-sided t-test. In Study 2, we then analysed scores on the Czech SPQ and SBQ on a much larger sample. We also checked for the effect of various personal characteristics (age, gender, level of education, biology background) and other assessments of snake fear (SNAQ) and disgust propensity (DS-R) using a Spearmann correlation, redundancy analysis, and general linear models. Results: In Study 1, we have demonstrated that the Czech SPQ and SBQ are equivalent to their originals and show excellent test-retest reliability (SPQ: 0.928; SBQ: 0.873-0.903). In Study 2, 10.3% of 3 863 subjects in total reached the cut-off point for potential spider phobia. Furthermore, SPQ and SBQ scores were highly correlated (0.727-.0787), signicantly more than with the SNAQ (0.208-0.324), which is evidence of the scales’ validity. Two multivariate statistical methods revealed a signicant effect of gender, age, level of education, biology background, and disgust propensity on the SPQ scores. Conclusion: In conclusion, our study provides a strong support to the hypothesis that fear of spiders is driven by their disgusting properties as spiders were often associated with decimating epidemics of plague and other diseases that were repeatedly ravaging Europe from the Middle Ages. Background Arachnophobia, the irrational fear of spiders, is one of the most common specic phobias, even more prevalent than clinical fear of snakes, ophidiophobia. Based on the literature, arachnophobia affects 2.7– 6.1% of people in the general population, signicantly more women than men (Oosterink et al., 2009). The average prevalence of spider phobia varies across different countries, ranging from 2.7% in the Netherlands (Oosterink et al., 2009), through 3.5% in Sweden (Fredrikson et al., 1996) to even 8.1% (Zsido et al., 2018) and 9.5% in Hungary (Zsido, 2017). Even prevalence of intensive though non-clinical fear of spiders is among the highest ones. In an epidemiological study that surveyed 813 American college students, most of them (34%) reported signicant or severe fear of spiders compared to 22% reporting fear of snakes (Seim & Spates, 2009). The exact gender ratio may differ, but it is generally estimated that there may be up to 4 times more spider phobic women (Fredrikson et al., 1996). The fact that spiders are a universal human dread is often exploited in the movie industry where many monster archetypes seem to tap into widespread arachnophobia (Asma, 2011). Page 2/26 Spider phobia has a great negative impact on the patient’s wellbeing and quality of life (APA, 2013). It usually puts limits on the individual’s sport activities especially if outdoors (Thorpe & Salkovskis, 1999). Typically, spider phobics express several cognitive biases and distortions as well, manifested in assigning unnatural attributes and unreal intentions to spiders (Arntz et al., 1993). Despite signicant consequences on one’s life, patients suffering from arachnophobia only rarely seek special treatment that is available (Doctor et al. 2008). Traditionally, psychology research was oriented on the conditioning theory of fear acquisition (Rachman, 1977), which tried to explain emergence of spider fear as a result of direct or indirect negative experiences (through vicarious exposure or information transfer) with spiders. Meanwhile, other researchers have taken on the evolutionary perspective claiming that spiders are a prototypical example of ancestral threat eliciting fear. They argue with natural selection pressures acting on our pre-neolithic ancestors to learn to be afraid of spiders, which increased their survival chances. Subsequently, the tendency to fear and avoid these eight-legged arthropods was genetically xed and became a permanent phylogenetically based module in the human mind. According to that, spider fear is biologically prepared, hence the high ratio of spider phobics even in the modern world (Seligman, 1971; Öhman & Mineka, 2001). It has been demonstrated that spiders are found faster among fear-irrelevant distractors (e.g., owers) than vice versa (Öhman et al., 2001). Spiders are also better in capturing our attention even when presented on the periphery of the visual eld compared to a modern threatening stimulus (needle) or another fear-irrelevant animal (housey; New & German, 2015). Spider pictures that had been paired with aversive stimuli (electric shocks) evoked conditioned fear that was signicantly more resistant to extinction that fear conditioned to fear-irrelevant stimuli (see a review by McNally, 1987). Physiological arousal to spider pictures was observed in 6-month-old infants (Hoehl et al., 2017) and event-related brain potentials in 9-month-olds showed increased attention to spiders previously cued with a fearful expression (Hoehl & Pauen, 2017). However, recent studies have shown that spiders do not hold a special status in visual perception of both humans (Öhman et al., 2012) and primates (Kawai & Koda, 2016) and that snakes compared to spiders have a larger threat detection advantage. This was further supported by electroencephalography studies using the paradigm of evoked-brained potentials. Early posterior negativity in the occipital lobes which is associated with early visual perception of threatening stimuli is greater in response to snake but not spider images (He et al., 2014; Strien et al., 2014a,b). Given these results and a fact that venomous spider species that might deliver a fatal bite were rather scarce throughout the human evolution (Platnick et al., 2020), the potential threat posed by spiders to our ancestors has been repeatedly questioned and has no empirical support (Davey, 1994; Gerdes et al., 2009). On the other hand, many recent studies show that spiders elicit a great amount of disgust (Mulkens et al., 1996; de Jong & Muris, 2002; Polák et al., 2020a). Specically, some authors suggest that spiders trigger contamination-based fear (Davey, 1994, de Jong and Merckelbach, 1998). Gerdes and Page 3/26 colleagues (2009) showed that spiders are unique in eliciting signicantly greater fear and disgust than any other arthropod. It has been hypothesized within the context of disease-avoidance model (Matchett & Davey, 1991) that spider phobia develops from the convergence of the spiders’ disgusting properties and the subjective probability of involuntary physical contact with humans. Indeed, spiders are regarded as highly disgusting by healthy subjects and even more by spider phobics (de Jong & Muris, 2002), potentially due to their quirky ‘too-many-legs’ body plan. At the same time, they are omnipresent in our homes, often lurking in hidden dark places and capable of a fast unpredictable movement. Davey (1994) suggested that the disgust-relevant status of the spider resulted from its association with devastating plague pandemics that struck Europe from the Middle Ages onwards. Due to the lack of knowledge of aetiology, the spider seemed like a suitable displaced target. As a method of choice, simple self-report measures of fear of spiders are used, the most common is the Spider Questionnaire (SPQ, Klorman et al., 1974) and Spider Phobia Beliefs Questionnaire (SBQ, Arntz et al. 1993). Especially the rst one is widely used and has been already translated to several languages including Swedish (Fredrikson, 1983), Dutch (Muris & Merckelbach, 1996), or Hungarian (Zsido, 2017), but the Czech version has been missing and therefore, accurate data on real prevalence of arachnophobia in the Czech Republic are scarce. Moreover, a majority of spider phobics remain undiagnosed as those people do not often seek any specialist help. As for the SBQ, this measure has received only very limited interest since its publication, although it may prove signicant contribution to the psychological prole of spider phobics. Thus, the main aim was to develop a standardized Czech translation of the two assessments of spider fear (SPQ and SBQ), describe its prevalence in the Czech population (i.e. create local norms), and compare the results with the existing literature. As anxiety associated with spiders may also have a signicant disgust component, we analysed a relationship between these two instruments and a measure of disgust propensity (Disgust Scale-Revised, DS-R). We also used a measure of snake fear (Snake Questionnaire, SNAQ) to test divergent validity. Finally, we analysed the effect of basic demographic characteristics on spider fear, such as gender, age, and the level and type of education. Study 1 – Standard Translation Of Spq And Sbq Methods Subjects For this study of test adaptation into the Czech language, we recruited a sample of 869 individuals with disproportionally more females than males (N = 613 vs. 256, 70.5%), the age range was 15–88 years (mean age 22.8 ± 0.3 years).
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