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Arachnophobia is the fear of and other , such as and . The word "arachnophobia" comes from the Greek words and .
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 disproportionate fear of spiders in comparison to other, potentially dangerous creatures present during Homo sapiens' environment of evolutionary adaptiveness may have had drawbacks.
In The Handbook of the Emotions (1993), psychologist Arne Öhman studied pairing an unconditioned stimulus with evolutionarily-relevant fear-response Neutral stimulus ( and ) versus evolutionarily-irrelevant fear-response neutral stimuli (, , Toy block of polyhedron, , and electrical outlets) on human subjects and found that ophidiophobia (fear of snakes) and arachnophobia required only one pairing to develop a conditioned response while mycophobia, anthophobia, of physical representations of polyhedra, firearms, and electrical outlets required multiple pairings and went extinct without continued conditioning while the conditioned ophidiophobia and arachnophobia were permanent.
Psychiatrist Randolph M. Nesse notes that while conditioned fear responses to evolutionarily novel dangerous objects such as electrical outlets is possible, the conditioning is slower because such cues have no prewired connection to fear, noting further that despite the emphasis of the risks of Speed limit and drunk driving in driver's education, it alone does not provide reliable protection against traffic collisions and that nearly one-quarter of all deaths in 2014 of people aged 15 to 24 in the United States were in traffic collisions. Nesse, psychiatrist Isaac Marks, and evolutionary biologist George C. Williams have noted that people with systematically deficient responses to various adaptive phobias (e.g. arachnophobia, ophidiophobia, basophobia) are more Carelessness and more likely to receive unintentional injuries that are potentially fatal and have proposed that such deficient phobia should be classified as " hypophobia" due to its selfish genetic consequences. (2026). 9780471264033, Wiley. ISBN 9780471264033 (2026). 9781118755808, Wiley. ISBN 9781118755808
A 2001 study found that people could detect images of spiders among images of flowers and mushrooms more quickly than they could detect images of flowers or mushrooms among images of spiders. The researchers suggested that this was because fast response to spiders was more relevant to human evolution.Öhman, A., Flykt, A., & Esteves, F. (2001). "Emotion drives attention: Detecting the snake in the grass". Journal of Experimental Psychology: 130 (3), 466–478.
A 2021 research article found that perceived fear and disgust of spiders were triggered predominantly by enlarged chelicerae, enlarged abdomen, and the presence of body hair.
Stories about spiders in the media often contain errors and use sensationalistic vocabulary, which could contribute to the fear of spiders.
Recent advances in technology have enabled the use of Virtual reality spiders for use in therapy. These techniques have proven to be effective. It has been suggested that exposure to short clips from the Spider-Man movies may help to reduce an individual's arachnophobia.
Even though most spiders are small and not venomous, they still trigger intense fear in many people, making arachnophobia one of the most widespread anxiety disorders. It is strongly linked to sociodemographic factors like gender, age, education, and an individual's tendency toward disgust. The majority of studies show that females are more likely to develop this phobia.
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