Fear of spiders: The effect of real threat on the interference caused by symbolic threat

Abstract

The effect of the presence of a real spider on attentional biases for symbolic spider stimuli was examined in 42 low-fearful and 26 high-spider-fearful participants. They completed a word colour-naming task as well as a picture orientation-judgement task, both with versus without a spider present in the experimental room. In both tasks, spider-related words and pictures interfered with task performance in high-fearfuls, but not low-fearfuls, revealing an attentional bias for spider-related stimuli in spider-fearfuls. This was true both with and without a real spider present. These results suggest that, partly in contrast to earlier findings, the presence of a real threat stimulus had no influence on the interference caused by symbolic threat stimuli.

Keywords:

• Spider fear
• Attentional bias
• Real threat
• Symbolic threat
• Emotional Stroop task

Acknowledgements

Preparation of this paper was supported by the Behavioural Science Institute of Radboud University Nijmegen.

We would like to thank Anja Gattinger, Hanneke Jespers, Linda Meijer, Marjolein Muskens, Julia Trumpf, and Marcella Woud for their help in data collection. We are also grateful to the anonymous reviewers for helpful comments on an earlier version of the paper.