ArticleBMC psychiatry2022
Measuring fear evoked by the scariest animal: Czech versions of the Spider Questionnaire and Spider Phobia Beliefs Questionnaire.
Article in BMC psychiatry, 2022. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 8 papers.
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8 citing papers in PubMed, 17 citations in OpenAlex.
- Individual threat-relevance accelerates belief-updating in conditioned hallucinations.Scientific reports · 2026Article
- Development and psychometric validation of the insect fear questionnaire for school-aged children in Iran.PloS one · 2026Article
- Imprint of ancestral and modern threats in human mind - experience of fear, disgust, and anger.Frontiers in psychology · 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
- Spider vs. guns: expectancy and attention biases to phylogenetic threat do not extend to ontogenetic threat.Frontiers in psychology · 2023Article
- Human emotional evaluation of ancestral and modern threats: fear, disgust, and anger.Frontiers in psychology · 2023Article
- Toward a reliable detection of arachnophobia: subjective, behavioral, and neurophysiological measures of fear response.Frontiers in psychiatry · 2023Article
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Authors and funding
8 authors at 2 institutions in 1 country.
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No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
backgroundAlthough tiny in size and mostly harmless, spiders evoke exceptional fear in a significant part of the population and arachnophobia is one of the most common anxiety disorders with prevalence 2.7-6.1%. Two standard measures 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). We aimed to develop and validate their Czech translations, describe distribution of spider fear in the Czech population, and analyse its association with disgust propensity and other sociodemographic characteristics.
methodsIn Phase 1, we developed Czech translations of both questionnaires 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 Phase 2, we analysed scores on the Czech SPQ and SBQ on a larger sample. We evaluated the effects of age, gender, level of education, biology background, and association with the assessments of snake fear (i.e. the Snake Questionnaire, SNAQ) and disgust propensity (i.e. the Disgust Scale-Revised, DS-R) using a Spearman correlation, redundancy analysis, and general linear models.
resultsWe have demonstrated that the Czech SPQ and SBQ are equivalent to their originals and show excellent test-retest reliability (SPQ: 0.93; SBQ: 0.87-0.90). In total, 398 (10.3%) out of 3863 subjects reached the cut-off point for potential spider phobia. In addition, SPQ and SBQ scores were highly correlated (0.73-0.79), significantly more than with the SNAQ (0.21-0.32) or the DS-R (0.36-0.40). Two multivariate statistical methods revealed a significant association between the gender, age, level of education, biology background, or disgust propensity and the SPQ scores.
conclusionThe Czech SPQ and SBQ may produce reliable and valid assessments of spider fear, but they must be further psychometrically tested considering the limitation of this study before wider use. We corroborate previous findings that fear of spiders is significantly associated with sociodemographic variables, such as gender, age, or education, as well as with the individual level of disgust propensity.
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