What Makes Spiders Frightening and Disgusting to People?

Abstract

The quality of human-animal interactions may crucially influence conservation efforts. Unfortunately, and despite their important roles in the functioning of the ecosystem, some animals are considered notoriously unpopular. Using the forced-choice paradigm, we investigated which cues humans perceive as frightening and disgusting in spiders, one of the most unpleasant animals in the world. The research was carried out with a representative sample of N = 1,015 Slovak adults. We found that perceived fear and disgust of spiders were triggered predominantly by enlarged chelicerae, enlarged abdomen, and the presence of body hair. Longer legs were associated with perceived fear as well; however, the presence of two eyes did not produce any statistical significance in terms of fear. We hope that further research in this field, where additional cues can be manipulated (e.g., color and number of legs), will improve conservation efforts by using an improved reputation of spiders in the eyes of the general public.

Emotions triggered by live arthropods shed light on spider phobia

“…1 ). This result is generally consistent with the study of Zvarikova et al 66 where the experimentally enlarged body parts of spider stimuli elicited greater fear.…”

Development and initial validation of an open-access online Behavioral Avoidance Test (BAT) for spider fear.

“…All 3D assets employed in vBATon were created using Blender, a widely used free and open-source 3D computer graphics software (Community, 2018). In order to enhance the aversive nature of the spider displayed in vBATon, we utilized a model of a large wolf spider ( Lycosidae) with distinctive abdomen and chelicerae (Zvaríková et al, 2021). Previous research successfully demonstrated that animated spiders are able to elicit anxiety and disgust in spider-fearful individuals (Grill & Haberkamp, 2023b).…”

An expert-curated global database of online newspaper articles on spiders and spider bites

“…Examples of titles of sensationalistic versus non-sensationalistic news articles focusing on the same event are: “Thousands of spiders ‘bleed out of the walls’ and force family from home” vs. “Home Infested With Brown Recluse Spiders in Missouri”. Throughout the database, frequent words associated with sensationalistic content were ‘alarm’, ‘agony’, ‘attack’, ‘boom’, ‘deadly’, ‘creepy crawly’, ‘devil’, ‘fear’, ‘hell’, ‘killer’, ‘murderer’, ‘nasty’, ‘nightmare’, ‘panic’, ‘terrible’, ‘terrifying’, and ‘terror’ 2 , as well as magnifying adjectives that exaggerated any features of the encounter (e.g., body size 34 – 36 , hairiness 35 ). However, the presence of one of these words did not necessarily result in an article being scored as sensationalistic.…”