Fear of Spiders Makes Them Look Bigger
恐惧使蜘蛛变大

Arachnophobic study subjects estimated the size of spiders as bigger than did people who do not fear the eight-legged beasties.
相对于那些不害怕蜘蛛这种八条腿生物的人来说，对蜘蛛有恐惧症的人会把蜘蛛的体型估计得更大。

撰文：詹森·戈德曼
翻译：惠丹丹
审核：邰伦玥

"Both of us were in the lab when we just saw a spider, and I'm really afraid of them. So I started to scream for her to come and pick it up because she's not afraid of them.”Ben-Gurion University of the Negev psychologist Tali Leibovich, talking about herself and a colleague.
内盖夫班吉里昂大学心理学家塔利·列伊博维奇说了一件她与一个同事之间发生的事：“我们两人都在实验室里看到了蜘蛛，我非常害怕，尖叫着让她把蜘蛛弄走，因为她不害怕蜘蛛。”

“And she said, 'but it's small, how come you're afraid of it?' And I said, 'no it's huge!' And she said 'it's small'; I said 'it's huge.' We started arguing, and this is why we started this study. To see who is right."
她说：“这是一个很小的蜘蛛，你怎么害怕它？”而我说，“不，它非常的巨大！”而她又说小，我说很大。我们开始争论，这就是我们开始研究这个项目的原因，我们要知道谁才是对的。

Leibovich does not ordinarily study spiders. But this spider encounter made her curious about how the human brain understands magnitude—what are the factors that influence our estimation of how big or small something is? And does fear play a role?
列伊博维奇一般不研究蜘蛛，但是这一次与蜘蛛的偶遇让她好奇人是怎么理解事物大小的——是什么因素影响我们估计一个东西的大与小？恐惧会对其有影响吗？

So she and colleagues did an experiment in which participants had to say how big a spider in a photo was on a scale from housefly to goat. And the subjects who were afraid of spiders consistently rated the arachnids as larger than did the non-phobic participants.
因此她和同事做了一个实验，实验中参与者要指出相片中的蜘蛛有多大，大小范围从苍蝇到山羊。害怕蜘蛛的参与者都把蜘蛛想得比不害怕的参与者要更大。

But the spider-phobes did not miscalculate the size of butterflies or birds. Nor did they see wasps as larger-than-life, even though wasps can be dangerous. The estimation error was spider-specific. It seems our emotions drive us to experience the same world in very different ways. The results are in the journal Biological Psychology. [Tali Leibovich, Noga Cohen, and Avishai Henik, Itsy-bitsy spider? Valence and self-relevance predict size estimation.]
然而，蜘蛛恐惧者不会估错蝴蝶或鸟的大小。也不会把黄蜂看得比实际的大，即使黄蜂是危险的。这一错觉只是针对蜘蛛的。好像我们的情绪使我们以不同的方式感受这同一个世界。这一结果发表在生物心理学杂志上[Tali Leibovich, Noga Cohen, and Avishai Henik, Itsy-bitsy spider? Valence and self-relevance predict size estimation.]

"Now we can ask the question of what causes what? Is it the fear of spiders that makes you see them as larger, or first you see them as larger for some reason and because of it you start being afraid of them?"
“现在我们可以提出这样的问题：是对蜘蛛的恐惧导致你感觉蜘蛛很大，还是由于某种原因你先看到蜘蛛很大，从而导致你害怕它们？
”
If it's the latter, then perhaps spider-phobes can be trained to more accurately judge the size of the arachnids, and maybe that could ease their worries. Some might even come to see spiders as actually kind of cool—or at least not downright terrifying.
如果是后者，那么蜘蛛恐惧者可以通过训练来更精确的判断蜘蛛的大小，着也许也可以减轻他们的恐惧。一些甚至会认为蜘蛛有一点酷呢——或者至少不是完全的恐惧。