ArticlePloS one2021
Specificity of spiders among fear- and disgust-eliciting arthropods: Spiders are special, but phobics not so much.
Article in PloS one, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 13 papers.
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Who cites it
13 citing papers in PubMed, 29 citations in OpenAlex.
- Ecosystem services provided by spiders.Biological reviews of the Cambridge Philosophical Society · 2025Review
- Threat expectancies in a VR fear conditioning paradigm follow non-linear extinction patterns but are not influenced by intolerance of uncertainty.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Why Are Some Snakes More Terrifying and What Is Behind the Fear?Animals : an open access journal from MDPI · 2025Article
- The fear of spiders: perceptual features assessed in augmented reality.Frontiers in behavioral neuroscience · 2024Article
- The influence of spider news on online information-seeking.PloS one · 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
- Animals evoking fear in the Cradle of Humankind: snakes, scorpions, and large carnivores.Die Naturwissenschaften · 2023Article
- WASP: the World Archives of Species Perception.Database : the journal of biological databases and curation · 2023Article
- Are vipers prototypic fear-evoking snakes? A cross-cultural comparison 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
- Toward a reliable detection of arachnophobia: subjective, behavioral, and neurophysiological measures of fear response.Frontiers in psychiatry · 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
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
7 authors at 2 institutions in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
To investigate a specificity of spiders as a prototypical fear- and disgust-eliciting stimuli, we conducted an online experiment. The respondents rated images of 25 spiders, 12 non-spider chelicerates, and 10 other arthropods on a fear and disgust 7-point scale. The evaluation of 968 Central European respondents confirmed the specificity of spiders among fear- and disgust-eliciting arthropods and supported the notion of spiders as a cognitive category. We delineated this category as covering extant spider species as well as some other chelicerates bearing a physical resemblance to spiders, mainly whip spiders and camel spiders. We suggested calling this category the spider-like cognitive category. We discussed evolutionary roots of the spider-like category and concluded that its roots should be sought in fear, with disgust being secondary of the two emotions. We suggested other chelicerates, e.g., scorpions, might have been important in formation and fixation of the spider-like category. Further, we investigated an effect of respondent's sensitivity to a specific fear of spiders on evaluation of the stimuli. We found that suspected phobic respondents were in their rating nearly identical to those with only high fear of spiders and similar to those with only moderate fear of spiders. We concluded that results based on healthy respondents with elevated fear should also be considered relevant for arachnophobia research.
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