2016-4-8

English

http://www.chinavoa.com/show-8469-236145-1.html

Fear of Spiders Makes Them Look Bigger

越恐惧越害怕

"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.”

“我看到蜘蛛时，那时我们两都在实验室，我真的非常害怕蜘蛛。所以我就开始大声尖叫让她来帮我把蜘蛛弄走，因为她不害怕蜘蛛。”

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Tali Leibovich，谈论了自己和同事的经历。

“And she said, 'but it's small, how come you're afraid of it?' And I said, 'no it's huge!' And she said 'it's small'; I said 'it's huge.' We started arguing, and this is why we started this study. To see who is right."

“我的同事说，蜘蛛就那么小，你怎么会害怕它呢?”我说，不，它那么大。她说蜘蛛很小的，但我则说，蜘蛛很大。我们开始争论起来。为了证明谁的观点是对的，我进行了这项研究。

Leibovich does not ordinarily study spiders. 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? And does fear play a role?

Leibovich并没有研究蜘蛛。但是这次偶遇蜘蛛的经历让她开始好奇人类的大脑如何理解大小——究竟是哪些因素在影响我们评判事物大小的标准的呢?恐惧是否也起作用呢?

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

所以她和同事做了一个实验。实验中，参与者必须说出照片的中蜘蛛与家蝇以及山羊相比的大小。与不害怕蜘蛛的参与者相比，害怕的实验对象总认为蜘蛛较大。

But the spider-phobes did not miscalculate the size of butterflies or birds. Nor did they see wasps as larger-than-life, even though wasps can be dangerous. The estimation error was spider-specific. It seems our emotions drive us to experience the same world in very different ways. The results are in the journal Biological Psychology.

但是蜘蛛恐惧症并不会错误判断蝴蝶或者鸟类的体型。同时，尽管黄蜂非常的危险，他们也不会认为黄蜂比实际偏大。这种错误的估计只是针对蜘蛛的。似乎我们的情感让我们用不同的方式体验同一世界。该研究结果发表在《生物心理学》杂志上。

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

“现在。我们可以问问原因是什么呢?是因为对害怕蜘蛛让你觉得他们体积变大，还是因为第一次看到蜘蛛时，就觉得它们体积较大，你然后就开始害怕?”

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

如果是后者，那么也许蜘蛛恐惧症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。有些人甚至认为，看蜘蛛很酷啊——至少不是很怕啊。