Health

Girls 'are genetically primed to fear spiders'

by israeli.agent | August 28, 2009 at 03:59 pm

213 views | 6 Recommendations | 1 comment

People always used to think that Arachnophobia is sort of a disease that is curable. But a new study says otherwise - well, there is a gender bias (twist) added to this. Women can be easily "hardcoded" with such phobias, unlike men. In other words women acquired greater degree of arachnophobia by "evolution". It is believed that half of women and ten percent of men (including yours truly) in this world are having varying degrees of 'spider fear'. Apparently the greatest of threats to humanity in the earlier stage were majorly from spiders and reptiles.

The sight of a spider crawling the wall makes many people scream and run -- but a new study says that women are four times more likely to be fearful than men as they are genetically primed to get scared.

An international team has found women are genetically predisposed to develop fears for potentially dangerous animals -- in fact, once baby girls have learned to associate spiders with fear, they don't forget, but boys do.

"It makes evolutionary sense to acquire spider fear at a certain age, rather than to be born with it. There is little reason for an infant to fear an object unless it responds to it for example by crawling away," the 'New Scientist' quoted team leader David Rakison of Carnegie Mellon University.