ReviewFrontiers in psychology2019
Are Humans Prepared to Detect, Fear, and Avoid Snakes? The Mismatch Between Laboratory and Ecological Evidence.
Review in Frontiers in psychology, 2019. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 15 papers.
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Who cites it
15 citing papers in PubMed.
- Article
- Utilising snake rescue data to understand snake-human conflict in Hooghly, West Bengal, India.Transactions of the Royal Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene · 2025Article
- Unpredictable aggressive defence of the venomous snake, Crotalus ravus, towards predators and humans.Biology open · 2025Article
- Hooding cobras can get ahead of other snakes in the ability to evoke human fear.Die Naturwissenschaften · 2024Article
- Challenges in rescuing snakes to protect human lives and promote snake conservation in Tamil Nadu, India.PLoS neglected tropical diseases · 2024Article
- Attentional, emotional, and behavioral response toward spiders, scorpions, crabs, and snakes provides no evidence for generalized fear between spiders and scorpions.Scientific reports · 2023Article
- Spot the odd one out: do snake pictures capture macaques' attention more than other predators?Animal cognition · 2023Article
- The bigger the threat, the longer the gaze? A cross-cultural study of Somalis and Czechs.Frontiers in psychology · 2023Article
- Spider vs. guns: expectancy and attention biases to phylogenetic threat do not extend to ontogenetic threat.Frontiers in psychology · 2023Article
- Are vipers prototypic fear-evoking snakes? A cross-cultural comparison of Somalis and Czechs.Frontiers in psychology · 2023Article
- Do Spiders Ride on the Fear of Scorpions? A Cross-Cultural Eye Tracking Study.Animals : an open access journal from MDPI · 2022Article
- Emotions triggered by live arthropods shed light on spider phobia.Scientific reports · 2021Article
- Effects of cognitive load and type of object on the visual looming bias.Attention, perception & psychophysics · 2021Article
- Emotional Reaction to Fear- and Disgust-Evoking Snakes: Sensitivity and Propensity in Snake-Fearful Respondents.Frontiers in psychology · 2020Article
- Venomous snakes elicit stronger fear than nonvenomous ones: Psychophysiological response to snake images.PloS one · 2020Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
5 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Since Seligman (1971) statement that the vast majority of phobias are about objects essential to the survival of a species, a multitude of laboratory studies followed, supporting the finding that humans learn to fear and detect snakes (and other animals) faster than other stimuli. Most of these studies used schematic drawings, images, or pictures of snakes, and only a small amount of fieldwork in naturalistic environments was done. We address fear preparedness theories and automatic fast detection data from mainstream laboratory data and compare it with ethobehavioral information relative to snakes, predator-prey interaction, and snakes' defensive kinematics strikes in order to analyze their potential matching. From this analysis, four main findings arose, namely that (1) snakebites occur when people are very close to the snake and are unaware or unable to escape the bite; (2) human visual detection and escape response is slow compared to the speed of snake strikes; (3) in natural environments, snake experts are often unable to see snakes existing nearby; (4) animate objects in general capture more attention over other stimuli and dangerous, but recent objects in evolutionary terms are also able to be detected fast. The issues mentioned above pose several challenges to evolutionary psychology-based theories expecting to find special-purpose neural modules. The older selective habituation hypothesis (Schleidt, 1961) that prey animals start with a rather general predator image from which specific harmless cues are removed by habituation might deserve reconsideration.
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