HEY LADIES: Turns Out Your Fear Of Spiders Could Be Entirely Hormonal

My rational brain knows that spiders are mostly harmless, relatively genial dudes who are just trying their best to live in a world where their ideal version of a home happens to be a collection of sticky filaments slung across busy footpaths at exactly at human eye-level. My not so rational brain believes spiders to be insidious, malicious monsters designed by God as a punishment on humanity for having figured out a bunch of cool sex stuff that wasn’t included in the Bible.

While my fear of spiders presents itself mostly as just a natural aversion to having one crawl on or near me, there are people out there whose arachnophobia is very real to the point of being debilitating. For some reason, the majority of those people are women.
Of the 1 in 10 people who suffer (in scientific terms) fully legit arachnophobia, studies indicate that up to 9 in 10 of those people are women, and researchers at the University of New South Wales reckon there might be a very special reason for that: sex hormones.
The researchers are trying to determine whether women are more likely to develop arachnophobia, as the data suggests, and whether treatment for the condition is less effective during periods in their menstrual cycle when female sex hormones are at their lowest levels.
Dr Bronwyn Graham of the UNSW’s School of Psychology believes there could be a correlation between fluctuations in hormone levels and the up to 40% rate at which exposure therapy isn’t effective in reducing spider-related anxiety:
“If we demonstrate that there are fluctuations in treatment response due to hormone levels it would certainly have big implications for how we should be treating women in the future.”
Participants in the study are attempting to address their exposure therapy, which means not just making them look at spiders, but finding out what their big fear about encountering a spider is and then making that happen – often meaning you’re going to be made to have a big old spider crawl on you, how nice.
Source: ABC.

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