U.Va. Research: Snake Phobia Hardwired - I agree

[NNN0LHI]

I have no phobia of snakes but when I come across one it still startles me. The part of the experiment with the children in the story was interesting too. I have read that even older children who had never been exposed to house cats in their lives reflexively knew that when a cat hissed it was bad business.

Don



http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/sns-ap-snake-phobia,1,3030022.story

CHARLOTTESVILLE, Va. - Two University of Virginia researchers believe that humans are genetically predisposed to be deathly afraid of snakes. Judy S. DeLoache, a U.Va. professor of developmental psychology, said she has a snake phobia, but wonders why. "The question was, where did that fear come from?"

She believes it's because snakes would have posed a significant threat to our ancestors, so a fear of snakes remains hardwired into human brains today.

DeLoache said an experiment she conducted with graduate student Vanessa LoBue proved that adults and preschool children have an extraordinary ability to quickly pinpoint snakes amid harmless distractions.

They conducted three experiments with 24 adults and 24 3-year-olds. Both groups were shown a large touch-screen computer monitor that displayed nine color photographs.

They asked half of the people to find the single image of a snake among non-threatening pictures of caterpillars, flowers or frogs. The second group was told to find the single photo of a single non-threatening item among eight images of snakes.

The researchers found that adults and children were much faster at discovering snakes than they were at locating non-threatening flora or fauna.

The finding that children saw the snakes as rapidly as adults is particularly fascinating, LoBue said, because preschool children tend to be fearless and are less likely to have had a negative experience with snakes.