John Bennett-Levy & Theresa Marteau, 1984

AIMS: Evolutionary Psychology suggests phobias are once adaptive behaviours which helped our ancestors to survive; if we are extremely fearful of an animal and we try to get away from the animal, we are unlikely to get hurt by it. If the fearfulness becomes inherited by an individual’s offspring - ie: naturally selected - then that genetic line is more likely to survive than another genetic line that didn’t inherit that trait. The fears that were important to the survival of our ancestors may lie dormant in our brains

Martin Seligman (1971) proposes that humans are biologically predisposed to fear certain animals such as snakes. He found that 2-4 small electric shocks were enough to induce a phobia to pictures of spiders or snakes; however a larger series of shocks were required to induce the same sort of phobic response to pictures of flowers. Isaac Marks (1969) also supports this view as the distribution of animal phobias is non-random and there does not appear to be an equal distribution of traumatic experience with these animals. John Gray (1971) points out that the age of onset of animal problems is non-randomly distributed, reaching a peak at around 4 years old.

Susan Mineka, Richard Keir & Veda Price (1980), however, found that wild-reared monkeys showed considerable fear of real, model and toy snakes, whereas laboratory-reared monkeys only showed only a mild response to the snakes; Mineka et al therefore concluded observational conditioning is involved in the origins of many human and non-human primates' fears and phobias. However, Bennett-Levy & Marteau challenged this finding as they claim that the laboratory-reared monkeys demonstrated the most fear of the real snake and that this was because the real snake showed a significant amount of movement. Bennett-Levy & Marteau suggested that monkeys (and humans) may not have a ‘prepared template’ to fear snakes per se, but they may be prepared to fear ‘snake-like movements’. They were influenced in this by T C Shneirla (1965) who noted that animals which move suddenly and unpredictably (towards the observer) are more likely to produce a greater fear response. Bennett-Levy & Marteau were also influenced by the work of Robert Hinde (1974) who suggested that certain other characteristics, such as novelty and strangeness, evoke a fear response. (Hinde attributed this to the degree of discrepancy between a stimulus - eg: snake - and the organism’s internal model of the world.)

So Bennett-Levy & Marteau aimed to investigate if human beings are biologically prepared to fear certain stimulus configurations in animals, such as rapid/abrupt movement and discrepancies from the human form and whether these ratings are meaningfully related to the distribution of ratings of fear and avoidance of these animals.

PROCEDURE (METHOD):

113 participants who were attending a British health centre were asked to fill in one of two questionnaires. The questionnaires were distributed in a random order.

Group 1 (completed Questionnaire 1) included 34 females and 30 males. The mean age of group 1 was 35.5 years; standard deviation: 16.9.

Group 2 (completed Questionnaire 2) included 25 females and 24 males. The mean age of group 2 was 35.1 years; standard deviation: 16.4.

Questionnaire 1 was designed to measure self-reported fear and avoidance of a 29 small harmless animals and insects. Participants rated their fear of the animal on a 3-point scale:-

• 1= not afraid
• 2= quite afraid
• 3= very afraid

Participants rated their avoidance by completing a 5-point scale of nearness:-

• 1= enjoy picking it up;
• 2= would pick it up, but unpleasant
• 3= touch it or go within six inches
• 4= stand 1-6 feet away
• move further than six feet away

Participants were instructed that “as some animals and insects are difficult to pick up in the wild, imagine that they have been injured in some way. For instance, the birds have a broken wing, or the squirrel a broken foot, etc”. Where the animals might have been thought of as being harmful (e.g. grass snakes, jellyfish), the instruction ‘not harmful’ was included.

Questionnaire 2 was designed to measure self-reported ratings of the same 29 animals and insects as used in Questionnaire 1, specifically along 4 perceptual dimensions. The following instructions were given: “We would like you to consider how UGLY, SLIMY and SPEEDY the animals are, and how SUDDENLY they appear to MOVE”. A 3-point scale was used:-

• 1=not
• 2= quite
• 3= very).

The 29 animals and insects included in both questionnaires were: rat, cockroach, jellyfish (not harmful), spider, slug, grass snake (not harmful), beetle, lizard, worm, frog, moth, ant, crow, mouse, grasshopper, squirrel, caterpillar, baby seal, blackbird, hamster, baby chimpanzee, butterfly, spaniel (dog), tortoise, robin, lamb, cat, ladybird and rabbit.

FINDINGS (RESULTS): The first table shows the mean ratings of animal characteristics, fear and nearness ratings.

Rats were feared more than any other animal. Informal questioning suggested that it was because they were perceived as potentially harmful.

In the ratings for nearness, females were found to be less willing to approach or pick up 10 of the animals than males. These animals were (in descending order) jellyfish, cockroach, ant moth, crow, worm, beetle slug, mouse and spider. Similar differences were found in the fear ratings. Group 1 men rated themselves as less fearful than the women but seemed just as responsive to the animal characteristics. The rank order correlation between nearness ratings of animals in men and women was r = 0.96 with p<0.001.

There were no notable sex differences in ratings of ugliness, sliminess, speediness and suddenness of movement.  

The second table is a correlation matrix of animal characteristics, fear and nearness measures (p <0.01 except * where p<0.001).

Ratings of ugliness and sliminess were significantly correlated with nearness and fear measures.

CONCLUSIONS:  Bennett-Levy & Marteau concluded:“The results of this study suggest that the perceptual characteristics of animals are of some importance in determining their positive or negative appraisal by humans....

“The results from the study indicated that humans are probably not prepared specifically to fear animals ‘of biological significance to the species’. Rather, the degree to which humans are prepared to approach or fear an animal depends not only on its objective harmfulness, but also on the presence of certain fear-evoking perceptual properties, and its discrepancy from the human form.”

CRITICISMS (EVALUATION): An effort was made to avoid fear-ratings being related to the actual dangerousness of some species. For example, it was made clear to participants that the grass snake and jellyfish were 'not harmful'. Nevertheless, as some participants identified in subsequent questioning, the fear of rats was based (in part) on their perception as potentially harmful, so this precaution was not entirely successful.

In 1987 Harald Merckelbach, Marcel van den Hout & Margo van der Molen repeated Bennett-Levy & Marteau’s research and found similar results.

Useful applications were suggested as a result of Bennett-Levy & Marteau’s research. For example, as perceptual characteristics were found to be important, these could guide desensitisation. In the treatment of people with a phobia of slugs (which are slimy) the use of slimy inanimate objects such as wet soap and porridge were suggested.

Various research with animals has shown that animals such as rhesus monkeys can acquire fears by observing the reactions of

of other animals to novel stimuli, ie through social learning. In relation to prepared fears, Michael Cook & Susan Mineka (1989) found that rhesus monkeys could acquire fear through social learning to fear-relevant stimuli (toy snakes and crocodiles) but not of fear-irrelevant stimuli (flowers and a toy rabbit). This again supports the idea of preparedness. Subsequently, Cook & Mineka (1990), again using rhesus monkeys, showed them edited videotapes of models reacting fearfully to toy snakes and non-fearfully to artificial flowers or vice versa. The observers only acquired a fear in the former condition, ie when they watched a monkey responding with fear to a snake. Interestingly, Mineka & Cook (1986) had shown earlier that it was possible to ‘inoculate’ a monkey against acquiring a feart if it was first shown videos of  other monkeys behaving non-fearfully with a snake

Although published prior to Bennett-Levy & Marteau (1984), similar studies conducted with humans have shown that we, too, are more likely to learn fear responses to 'prepared' stimuli. Eg; A Öhman, M Fredrikson, K Hugdahl & P A Rimmö (1976) showed that, when paired with an electric shock, participants were more likely to acquire fear responses to snakes and spiders than flowers or mushrooms. This response, indicated by a change in galvanic skin resistance (GSR) - a measure of 'sweatiness' associated with fear - was quicker to subside (ie: to extinguish) for the non-prepared stimuli. However, Öhman et al did express some reservations about their study; they felt that, according to theory of preparedness, a fear of snakes should have been faster to acquire and more resistant to extinction.

More recently, M Regan & R Howard (1995) have shown that people can be more readily conditioned to fear-relevant stimuli (small animals) than fear-irrelevant ones (landscapes), using white noise as the aversive stimulus. This supports the idea of preparedness as it suggests that affective (emotional) responses are automatically generated to some kinds of stimuli. One biological imperative for fear is risk of disease. G Matchett & Graham Davey (1991) and J Ware, K Jain, I Burgess & Graham Davey (1994) looked at the relationship between animal fears relating to contamination and to likelihood of attack. They investigated fear of predatory animals and other fear-relevant animals. Both groups of animals elicited fear but only the other fear-relevant animals also elicited disgust. Those participants with the greatest fear of the 'disgusting' animals also scored highly on scales such as fear of illness and nearness. Davey, A S McDonald, U Hirisave, G G  Prabhu, S Iwawaki, C I Jim, Merckelbach, P J de Jong, P W Leung & B C Reimann (1998) conducted a cross-cultural study into animal fears and found that, although cultures share fear for animals which are fierce, the greatest similarity was in those eliciting disgust; again indicating a link between phobias and animal-borne disease. This supports a disease-avoidance model of animal fears (eg: Matchett & Davey, 1991). The distinction between fear of fierce and infection-risk animals is demonstrated by experimental evidence from Davey, Kate Cavanagh & Alice Lamb (2003). They found that people will tend to become classically conditioned to pain responses associated with predatory animals (ie fierce ones). Disgust-related unconditioned stimuli, however, were more readily associated with low-predation animals (ie ones with a disease risk) than with safe ones.

The findings of Merckelbach, De Jong, I Leeuw & van den Hout (1995) provide further evidence for the idea of preparedness but also suggest that there are flaws in some of the research in this area. Merckelbach et al compared a range of stimuli used in tests of preparedness and asked student participants to rate them for fearfulness, dangerousness and movement, and expert biologists to rate them for 'survival relevance' ie the genuine level of threat they present. Fear correlated with survival relevance, dangerousness and unpredictability of movement - this aspect of the findings supported the concept of preparedness. However, the survival relevance ratings suggested that the current practice of using flowers and mushrooms as 'neutral' and snakes and spiders and 'phobia-relevant' was not justified.

This view was supported by Öhman (2000) who found, in a neo-replication of Seligman (1971), that conditioned fear responses to stimuli such as houses and flowers became extinct as soon as the aversive shock was no longer paired with these stimuli. However, a fear response still persisted with stimuli such as snakes and spiders.