心理咨询师解答人为什么害怕蜘蛛

"Both of us were in the lab when we just saw a spider, and I'm really afraid of them. So I started to scream for her to come and pick it up because she's not afraid of them.”

“我们看到蜘蛛是在实验室里，我真的非常害怕这种生物。因此我就冲她大喊大叫让她把蜘蛛弄走，因为她不害怕。”

Ben-Gurion University of the Negev psychologist Tali Leibovich, talking about herself and a colleague.

班古里昂大学的内盖夫心理学家塔里·勒博维奇谈论着自己和同事的经历。

“And she said, but it's small, how come you're afraid of it?

“我的同事说，蜘蛛那么小的个头，你怎么会害怕呢?

And I said, no it's huge! And she said 'it's small; I said it's huge.

而我说，不，它很大的！她说蜘蛛很小，但我则说很大。

We started arguing, and this is why we started this study. To see who is right."

随后我们开始争论起来。而为了证明孰是孰非，我们开始了这项研究。

Leibovich does not ordinarily study spiders.

勒博维奇并没有按照常理出牌去研究蜘蛛。

But this spider encounter made her curious about how the human brain understands magnitude—what are the factors that influence our estimation of how big or small something is?

但这次被蜘蛛吓到的经历让她对人类的大脑如何理解大小产生好奇—究竟是哪些因素对我们评判事物大小的标准产生影响呢?

And does fear play a role?

恐惧是否也在其中起到关键作用呢?

So she and colleagues did an experiment in which participants had to say how big a spider in a photo was on a scale from housefly to goat.

因此她和同事们进行了一项实验，参与其中的试验者们必须说出照片中从家蝇到山羊相大小的蜘蛛到底有多大。

And the subjects who were afraid of spiders consistently rated the arachnids as larger than did the non-phobic participants.

相比不害怕蜘蛛的受试者，对蜘蛛感到害怕的人认为这种生物更大一些。

But the spider-phobes did not miscalculate the size of butterflies or birds.

但蜘蛛恐惧症者并不会错误判断蝴蝶或鸟类的体型。

Nor did they see wasps as larger-than-life, even though wasps can be dangerous.

而且尽管黄蜂非常危险，他们也不会认为黄蜂比实际要大一些。

The estimation error was spider-specific.

这种错误的估计只针对蜘蛛。

It seems our emotions drive us to experience the same world in very different ways.

似乎我们的情感驱使着我们用不同的方式体验着同一个世界。

The results are in the journal Biological Psychology.

这项研究已在《生物心理学》杂志上发表。

"Now we can ask the question of what causes what?

“现在我们可以探究原因，是什么原因造成这种情况呢?

Is it the fear of spiders that makes you see them as larger, or first you see them as larger for some reason and because of it you start being afraid of them?"

是因为对蜘蛛的恐惧让你觉得它们看起来很大，还是第一次见到蜘蛛就觉得它们体积较大令你害怕?”

If it's the latter, then perhaps spider-phobes can be trained to more accurately judge the size of the arachnids, and maybe that could ease their worries.

如果是后者，那么蜘蛛恐惧症也许可以通过训练更准确地判断蜘蛛的大小，这样也许能缓解他们的担忧。

Some might even come to see spiders as actually kind of cool—or at least not downright terrifying.

有些人甚至认为看到蜘蛛很酷啊—至少不是很害怕。