The phobia being described is the phobia for snakes and spiders and angry faces.
Ohman (2000) Some people get very scared when they see something that looks like a snake only to realize later that it was just a twig. Also it is usually those people who are spider phobic who realize a spider moving in a ceiling. It is easy according to research done to detect a very angry face on the background of a happy crowd and it is not affected by the size of the crowd on the background.
Unhappy faces are easily determined as compared to the happy ones.Experiments were set up to determine whether emotional impact of stimuli led to realization of fearful creatures in the surrounding. The researcher did his research with the aim of knowing whether those participating in a research would discover a fear relevant stimulus faster on the background than fear-irrelevant stimulus and vice versa. They were put into a situation where there was a visual stimulus that was complex with nine pictures arranged in matrices of 3 by 3.
Those participating in the experiments were to press certain different keys to determine how fast they could see the pictures of snake, spider, flower and mushroom. The hypothesis was set to be that, it was easier to realize the snake and spider background faster than those for flowers and mushrooms.
Method
25 participants with aged between 21 to 41 and with mean average of 28 were selected. There were 12 men and 13 women who were not screened whether they fear snakes or spiders. The participants were seated in front of a milky glass screen to where the stimuli were projected. A stimulus which was colored was projected with a shuttered projector in order to control exposure duration and the time taken to react produced by micro switches.The stimuli were of four different color slides each containing nine individual exemplars was used to construct the stimulus matrices.
Snakes and spiders were targets in matrices with fear-irrelevant stimuli as distracters and vice versa. No more than three matrices were presented in sequence and two matrices with target in the same position were never presented after each other.Only response time was included in the analysis with errors replaced with the mean time taken to respond. Reaction time data was inverted before reduction and analysis and data presented in response time in ms to facilitate understanding
Results
The results showed that participants were faster in detection of snakes and spiders targets as compared to those of flowers and mushrooms. Therefore snakes and spiders can be said to be easily seen than flowers and mushrooms. These differences however could not be attributed to differential ease of processing the two types of stimuli, because the latency to decide that a target was not present in a matrix was independent of the fear relevance of the distracters.
There were no systematic effects of the position for fear-relevant targets although there was a systematic search pattern in the ordering of response time according to positions for snakes and spiders. Fear-relevant targets prompted more rapid shifts of attention from one picture to another. Also fear relevant targets seem to be seen immediately one pops out without much attention being required.
It was discovered that snake fearing patients locate snakes faster than spiders and vice versa.
Reference
James, W. (1890). The principles of psychology (Vol. 1). New York: Henry Holt and Co.
Ohman, A. (2000). Fear and anxiety: Evolutionary cognitive and clinical perspective. New York: Guilford press
