New research shows that babies as old as only a few months are able to identify objects as ‘spiders’ or ‘snakes’ and respond to them.
Snakes and spiders evoke fear and disgust in many people. Even in developed countries lots of people are frightened of these animals although hardly anybody comes into contact with them. Until now, there has been debate about whether this aversion is innate or learned. Scientists at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Leipzig and the Uppsala University have recently discovered that it is hereditary: Babies as young as six months old feel stressed when seeing these creatures—long before they could have learned this reaction.
Presumably, in Germany, most people have never come across a poisonous spider or snake in the wild. Here in this country, there are no spiders that pose a threat to humans. Likewise, for snakes, there are just two species that are indeed poisonous but they are so rare that you hardly ever encounter them. Nevertheless, there are few people that would not shiver at the thought of a spider crawling up their arm, however harmless it may be.
This fear can even develop into anxiety which limits a person’s daily life. Such people are always on edge and cannot enter a room before it is declared “spider free” or cannot venture out into nature for sheer fear that they may encounter a snake. In developed countries, one to five percent of the population are affected by a real phobia of these creatures.
Until now, it was not clear where this widespread aversion or anxiety stems from. While some scientists assume that we learn this fear from our surroundings when we are a child, others suppose that it is innate. The drawback of most previous studies on this topic was that they were conducted with adults or older children — making it hard to distinguish which behavior was learned and which was inborn. Such studies with children only tested whether they spot spiders and snakes faster than harmless animals or objects, not whether they show a direct physiological fear reaction.
Scientists at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Leipzig and the Uppsala University, Sweden, recently made a crucial observation: Even in infants, a stress reaction is evoked when they see a spider or a snake. And this is already at the age of six months, when they are still very immobile and have had little opportunity to learn that these animals can be dangerous.
Stress response evoked in babies
“When we showed pictures of a snake or a spider to the babies instead of a flower or a fish of the same size and color, they reacted with significantly bigger pupils”, says Stefanie Hoehl, lead investigator of the underlying study and neuroscientist at MPI CBS and the University of Vienna. “In constant light conditions, this change in the size of the pupils is an important signal for the activation of the noradrenergic system in the brain, which is responsible for stress reactions. Accordingly, even the youngest babies seem to be stressed by these groups of animals.”
“We conclude that fear of snakes and spiders is of evolutionary origin. Similar to primates, mechanisms in our brains enable us to identify objects as ‘spider’ or ‘snake’ and to react to them very fast. This obviously inherited stress reaction in turn predisposes us to learn these animals as dangerous or disgusting. When this accompanies further factors it can develop into a real fear or even phobia. “A strong panicky aversion exhibited by the parents or a genetic predisposition for a hyperactive amygdala, which is important for estimating hazards, can mean that increased attention towards these creatures becomes an anxiety disorder.”
A million-year-old fear
Interestingly, it is known from other studies that babies do not associate pictures of rhinos, bears, or other theoretically dangerous animals with fear. “We assume that the reason for this particular reaction upon seeing spiders and snakes is due to the coexistence of these potentially dangerous animals with humans and their ancestors for more than 40 to 60 million years — and therefore much longer than with today’s dangerous mammals.” The reaction which is induced by animal groups feared from birth could have been embedded in the brain for an evolutionarily long time.
For modern risks such as knives, syringes or sockets, presumably the same is true. From an evolutionary perspective, they have only existed for a short time, and there has been no time to establish reaction mechanisms in the brain from birth. “Parents know just how difficult it is to teach their children about everyday risks such as not poking their fingers into a socket,” Hoehl adds with a smile.
Reference: “Itsy bitsy spider…: Infants react with increased arousal to spiders and snakes” by Stefanie Hoehl, Kahl Hellmer, Maria Johansson and Gustaf Gredebäck, 18 October 2017, Frontiers in Psychology.
DOI: 10.3389/fpsyg.2017.01710
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6 Comments
Finally, I can be the first comment on something! …First comment!
You lost me completely when you referred to snakes being “poisonous” Poison is ingested so plants are poisonous. Venom is injected, so snakes and spiders would be venomous. This is grade school knowledge.
Thank you! Exactly what I came to the comment section for, but you beat me to it. Terribly written synopsis of an interesting study….
This does not convince me. Neither my parents, siblings, nor I have ever been afraid of spiders or snakes. We didn’t learn the fear in childhood, & I maintain it’s learned behaviour.
Dilated pupils are here said to indicate a stress reaction. In previous years I’d seen this response used to demonstrate *interest/attraction*, as when displaying nude female photos to males. Can we really have it both ways?
There are no poisonous snakes anywhere in the world. Feel free to eat them all