Arachnophobia
| Arachnophobia | |
|---|---|
| Pronunciation |
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| Classification and external resources | |
| Specialty | Psychiatry |
| ICD-10 | 40.2 |
Arachnophobia or arachnephobia is a specific phobia, the fear of spiders and other arachnids such as scorpions.
People with arachnophobia tend to feel uneasy in any area they believe could harbor spiders or that has visible signs of their presence, such as webs. If arachnophobics see a spider, they may not enter the general vicinity until they have overcome the panic attack that is often associated with their phobia. Some people scream, cry, have emotional outbursts, experience trouble breathing, sweat, or even have heart palpitations when they come in contact with an area near spiders or their webs. In some extreme cases, even a picture or a realistic drawing of a spider can trigger intense fear.
An evolutionary reason for the phobias remains unresolved. One view, especially held in evolutionary psychology, is that the presence of venomous spiders led to the evolution of a fear of spiders or made acquisition of a fear of spiders especially easy. Like all traits, there is variability in the intensity of fears of spiders, and those with more intense fears are classified as phobic. Spiders, for instance, being relatively small, do not fit the usual criterion for a threat in the animal kingdom where size is a factor, but they can be venomous.
By ensuring that their surroundings were free from spiders, arachnophobes would have had a reduced risk of being bitten in ancestral environments, giving them a slight advantage over non-arachnophobes in terms of survival. However, having a disproportional fear of spiders in comparison to the other, potentially dangerous creatures that were present during Homo sapiens environment of evolutionary adaptiveness may have had drawbacks.
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