People who have spider phobia overestimate how grievous begin up close and personal with an arachnid really is . In late years , researchhas foundthat hoi polloi who are afraid of spiders view them as larger than they really are , and big than non - arachnophobes estimate . However , a new study point that this overestimation can be tweaked using virtual reality .
The study , issue inBiological Psychology , tested 61 people — almost all women—41 who were arachnophobic and 20 who were wanderer - ambivalent ( ( though only 22 in the phobic and 19 in the control chemical group made it through the whole study ) . They were demand to gauge the sizing of a unrecorded spider and report their fear levels in answer to the spider moving toward them on a special slide plate . player then move through four 5 - minute practical reality experiences where they were expose to a virtual wanderer . A few weeks later , they did the behavioural dodging trial run again , tell on their fear of the spider and how big it look to them .
Both grouping gauge the wanderer to be big than it was in reality , but people who were specifically afraid of spiders were worse at estimating actual wanderer size of it . The phobic group estimated the wanderer to be more than 80 percentage larger than it was , compared to an modal 40 per centum bigger estimated by the non - phobic group . Throughout the treatments , people reported less and less fear of the practical spider . The phobic participants overestimated the wanderer ’s size by a smaller allowance with each subsequent virtual exposure , while the non - phobic group ’s overestimation did n’t alter importantly . After discussion , the phobic group ’s perceptual preconception fall by 15 percent .
The study almost exclusively examined women , and did n’t have a dominance group of phobics who did not have the virtual reality wanderer , which might colour in the results . However , it advise that virtual reality can involve how people see the real human race , potentially facilitate people work through phobia .
[ h / tBPS Research Digest ]
