The sight of eight long black legs crawling slowly over the floor can make some people scream and run – and women are four times as likely to take fright than men. Now a study suggests that females are predisposed to develop fears for potentially dangerous animals.
David Rakison, a developmental psychologist at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, carried out an initial training phase in which he showed 10 girls and 10 boys, who were all 11 months old, a picture of a spider together with a fearful face. He then showed them test images of a spider paired with…
