The sight of eight long black legs moving over the floor makes some people scream and run—and women are four times more likely to take fright than men. Now a study suggests that females are genetically prone to develop fears for potentially dangerous animals. David Rakison, a developmental psychologist at Carnegie Mellon University inPittsburgh, Pennsylvania, found that baby girls only 11 months old rapidly start to associate pictures of spiders with fear. Baby boys remain merrily indifferent to this connection. In an initial training phase Rakison showed 10 baby girls and boys a picture of a spider together with a fearful face. In the following test phase he let them watch the image of a spider paired with a happy face, and the image of a flower paired with a fearful face. Despite the spider"s happy companion, the girls looked significantly longer at it than at the flower. The researchers took this to mean that the girls expected spiders to be linked with fear. The boys looked for an equal time at both images. With a different group of babies, Rakison first showed a spider with a happy face, and a flower with a fearful face. Now the girls too looked at both images for the same length of time—implying that they did not have an inborn fear of spiders. The results suggest that girls are more inclined than boys to learn to fear dangerous animals. By contrast, says Rakison, modem phobias such as fear of flying or injections show no sex difference. He attributes the difference to behavioural differences between men and women among our hunter-gatherer ancestors.A dislike for spiders may help women avoid dangerous animals, but in men evolution seems to have favoured more risk-taking behaviour for successful hunting. It makes evolutionary sense to acquire spider fear at a certain age, rather than to be born with it, he adds. "There is little reason for an infant to fear an object unless it can respond to it, for example by crawling away," he says. But if being scared of spiders is genetically inclined, is there any point in seeing a psychiatrist? "Even if a person is heavily inclined to develop spider phobia, exposure therapy would still be effective," says Jaime Derringer, a clinical psychologist from Washington University in St Louis. "But it may be more difficult to eliminate the association between spiders and a fearful response," she says.

单选题 We can learn from David Rakison"s study that _____.

单选题 In what aspect were the two groups different in David Rakison"s research?

单选题 David Rakison has most probably classified the fear for dangerous animals as a(n) _____.

单选题 According to David Rakison, men and women respond to spiders differently because men _____.

单选题 Jaime Derringer suggests that exposure therapy can most likely help _____.