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The article explores the concept of having a sense of humor as a virtue, focusing on its role in coping, connection, capability, and criticism. It discusses how humor can enhance or inhibit emotions like amusement, contempt, trust, and hope, depending on appropriateness. The text delves into the philosophical, social, and psychological aspects of humor, emphasizing its importance in fostering social relationships, collective action, and self-improvement. The paper suggests that a sense of humor is a multifaceted virtue that serves critical functions in various contexts, making it a valuable disposition for individuals and communities. [Extracted from the article]

Cognitive models propose that individuals with elevated vulnerability to experiencing negative emotion are characterised by biased attentional responding to negative information. Typically, methods of examining these biases have measured attention to pictures of emotional scenes, emotional faces, or rewarding or feared objects. Though these approaches have repeatedly yielded evidence of anxiety-linked biases, their measurement reliability is suggested to be poor. Recent research has shown that attentional responding to cues signalling negative information can be measured with greater reliability. However, whether such biases are associated with emotion vulnerability remains to be demonstrated. The present study conducted three experiments that recruited participants who varied in trait and state anxiety (N = 134), social anxiety (N = 122), or spider fear (N = 131) to complete an assessment of selective attention to cues signalling emotionally congruent negative information. Analyses demonstrated that anxiety and fear were associated with biased attentional responding to cues signalling negative information, and that such biases could be measured with acceptable reliability (rsplit-half =.69–.81). Implications for research on the relation between emotion and attention are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Spiders are among the animals evoking the highest fear and disgust and such a complex response might have been formed throughout human evolution. Ironically, most spiders do not present a serious threat, so the evolutionary explanation remains questionable. We suggest that other chelicerates, such as scorpions, have been potentially important in the formation and fixation of the spider-like category. In this eye-tracking study, we focused on the attentional, behavioral, and emotional response to images of spiders, scorpions, snakes, and crabs used as task-irrelevant distractors. Results show that spider-fearful subjects were selectively distracted by images of spiders and crabs. Interestingly, these stimuli were not rated as eliciting high fear contrary to the other animals. We hypothesize that spider-fearful participants might have mistaken crabs for spiders based on their shared physical characteristics. In contrast, subjects with no fear of spiders were the most distracted by snakes and scorpions which supports the view that scorpions as well as snakes are prioritized evolutionary relevant stimuli. We also found that the reaction time increased systematically with increasing subjective fear of spiders only when using spiders (and crabs to some extent) but not snakes and scorpions as distractors. The maximal pupil response covered not only the attentional and cognitive response but was also tightly correlated with the fear ratings of the picture stimuli. However, participants' fear of spiders did not affect individual reactions to scorpions measured by the maximal pupil response. We conclude that scorpions are evolutionary fear-relevant stimuli, however, the generalization between scorpions and spiders was not supported in spider-fearful participants. This result might be important for a better understanding of the evolution of spider phobia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Theories explain the presence of fears and specific phobias elicited by animals in contemporary WEIRD (Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic) populations by their evolutionary past in Africa. Nevertheless, empirical data about fears of animals in the Cradle of Humankind are still fragmentary. To fill this gap, we examined which local animals are perceived as the most frightening by Somali people, who inhabit a markedly similar environment and the region where humans have evolved. We asked 236 raters to rank 42 stimuli according to their elicited fear. The stimuli were standardized pictures of species representing the local fauna. The results showed that the most frightening animals were snakes, scorpions, the centipede, and large carnivores (cheetahs and hyenas). These were followed up by lizards and spiders. Unlike in Europe, spiders represent less salient stimuli than scorpions for Somali respondents in this study. This conforms to the hypothesis suggesting that fear of spiders was extended or redirected from other chelicerates. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Studies using the Approach/Avoidance Task (AAT) paradigm have demonstrated that individuals with heightened levels of spider-fear, as compared to lower levels of spider-fear, are characterised by biased action tendencies, indicated by speeded completion of movements that increase apparent distance between spider-stimuli and themselves (push movements), compared to movements that decrease apparent distance between spider-stimuli and themselves (pull response). Research using training variants of the AAT has also demonstrated that this pattern of action tendencies can be attenuated amongst individuals with heightened spider-fear. However, the effect of this manipulation on behaviour and emotion in the presence of a spider has not been examined. Eighty-eight participants who reported relatively high levels of spider-fear completed a procedure designed to either attenuate avoidance action tendencies for spider stimuli (Approach Spider Condition) or have no impact on action tendencies for spider stimuli (Control Condition). Action tendencies were assessed before and after the manipulation. Participants then completed a Behavioural Approach Task that recorded the number of steps voluntarily taken toward a spider and level of self-reported anxiety at each step. Analyses revealed that avoidance action tendencies to spider stimuli were attenuated in the Approach Spider Condition as compared to the Control Condition following the experimental manipulation, as intended. However, participants in each condition did not differ in behavioural or emotional measures recorded during the approach task. These findings replicate research indicating avoidance action tendencies to spider stimuli can be manipulated amongst individuals with heightened spider-fear, though suggest that their manipulation may not influence ‘real world’ behavioural or emotional responding to spiders. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Phobia against spiders or snakes is common in humans, and similar phobia-like behaviors have been observed in non-human animals. Visual images of snakes elicit phobia in humans, but sensory modalities that cause snake aversion in non-human animals are not well examined. In this study, we examined visually induced snake aversion in two rodent species. Using a three-compartment experimental chamber, reactions to images of snakes were compared between the diurnal precocious rodent Octodon degus and nocturnal laboratory mice. The snakes whose images were presented do not live in the original habitats of degus or mice. Snake aversion was assessed by presenting snake vs. no-image, snake vs. flower, snake vs. degu, and snake vs. mouse images. The time spent in a compartment with the snake image and with the non-snake images were measured. Degus avoided images of snakes in every tests. In contrast, mice did not display snake aversion. Degus are diurnal animals, i.e., visual information is important for their survival. Since mice are nocturnal, visual information is less important for survival. Such behavioral differences in the two species may explain the difference in visually induced aversion to snakes. A principal component analysis of the stimulus images suggests that elementary cues, such as color, do not explain the differences in the species' aversion to snakes. Finally, snake aversion in degus suggests that aversion is innate, since the animals were born and raised in a laboratory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Spiders are mostly harmless, yet they often trigger high levels of both fear and disgust, and arachnophobia (the phobia of spiders) ranks among the most common specific animal phobias. To investigate this apparent paradox, we turned to the only close relatives of spiders that pose a real danger to humans: scorpions. We adopted a unique methodology in order to assess authentic emotions elicited by arthropods. Over 300 respondents were asked to rate live specimens of 62 arthropod species (including spiders, scorpions, cockroaches, and other insects) based on perceived fear, disgust, and beauty. We found that species' scores on all three scales depended on the higher taxon as well as on body size. Spiders, scorpions, and other arachnids scored the highest in fear and disgust, while beetles and crabs scored the highest in beauty. Moreover, all chelicerates were perceived as one cohesive group, distinct from other arthropods, such as insects or crabs. Based on these results, we hypothesize that the fear of spiders might be triggered by a generalized fear of chelicerates, with scorpions being the original stimulus that signals danger. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: People with anxiety difficulties show different patterns in their deployment of attention to threat compared to people without anxiety difficulties. These attentional biases are assumed to play a critical role in the development and persistence of anxiety. However, little is known about factors that influence attentional biases to threat. An emerging body of evidence suggests that visual attention to threat varies across the time course according to one's motivation to approach vs. avoid threat. Methods: In order to better understand the relationship between motivation, attentional biases to threat, and anxiety, we had participants high in spider fear complete a sustained-attention task in full view of a live tarantula while their eye movements were tracked. Results: Participants who were ambivalent about whether to look at the spider or to avoid looking exhibited a unique pattern of visual attention to the spider, and reported higher spider fear and more negative affect than did other participants at the end of the study. Conclusions: Our findings suggest that anxiety persistence may have more to do with goal prioritization than innate attentional biases. Future studies of attentional biases to threat should take motivation into account and study attention across the time course. Ambivalent motivation to threat should also be targeted in exposure therapy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Specific phobia is associated with aberrant brain activation in confrontation paradigms with phobic stimuli. In previous EEG research enhanced event-related potentials (ERPs) in the late-positive potential (LPP) window have been observed. Further, studies with functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) and fMRI suggest that spider phobia is associated with enhanced activation within cortical and subcortical areas. In the current study we investigated the neuronal correlates of spider phobia in a combined fNIRS–EEG study. To this end, 37 spider phobic patients (PP) and 32 healthy controls (HC) underwent a symptom provocation paradigm during which subjects watched video clips of spiders and domestic animals (confrontation phase) after being primed on the content of the video (anticipation phase). Simultaneously, fNIRS, EEG, electromyography (EMG), electrocardiography and behavioral measures were assessed. Results showed increased LPP amplitudes, increased hemodynamic responses in the cognitive control network, and increased EMG activity and heart rate during spider conditions in PP in comparison to HC. Furthermore, in behavioral ratings PP showed higher emotional distress and avoidance. Behavioral ratings, fNIRS and EEG data showed positive correlations on a between-subject as well as on a within-subject level. Our results merge the existing data on neurophysiological correlates of phobic stimulus processing in hemodynamic and electrophysiological research and extend those of static visual material (pictures) to dynamic visual material (videos). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The current study examined the impact of a brief verbal rehearsal task on performance on two Implicit Relational Assessment Procedures (IRAPs), actual approach behavior towards a live spider (a behavioral approach task; BAT), and the relationship between the IRAPs and the BAT. Participants first completed the Fear of Spiders Questionnaire (FSQ) followed by one of two verbal rehearsal tasks, one of which focused on fear acceptance and the other on fear reduction as ways of coping with fear. All participants then completed two IRAPs similar to those employed by Leech, Barnes-Holmes, and Madden ( The Psychological Record, 66(3), doi:, 2016). Finally, participants completed the BAT using a live common house spider. Broadly similar findings were obtained for performance on the IRAPs as were reported by Leech et al. No significant differences between the two verbal-rehearsal conditions emerged on the self-report measures, the IRAPs, or the BAT. However, correlations between performances on the IRAPs and the BAT were concentrated in the reduce-fear condition. When considered in the context of the results previously reported by Leech et al., the differential pattern of correlations observed in the current study suggest that the verbal rehearsal task impacted upon a behavior-behavior relation that may be directly relevant to the concept of defusion in the acceptance and commitment therapy literature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is of the utmost importance that researchers can recreate, as accurately as possible, real-life conditions in psychological studies. However, that is not always possible. Given that phobias are rather context-specific, their study is the ideal candidate to assess the feasibility of using a mobile and wearable device for obtaining physiological and behavioral data. In this article, we propose BeMonitored, a smartphone-based solution to support more ecologically valid monitoring of psychological experiments. BeMonitored delivers customizable, specific context-dependent audiovisual stimuli and uses external resources connected via Bluetooth or a smartphone's own resources, while capturing the participant's behavior, physiology, and environment. We used BeMonitored in a spider phobia case study and showed that spider phobics differed from control participants in face motion, captured by the smartphone camera. Moreover, our results also revealed heart rate differences between spider and neutral stimuli in phobic participants. The presented results emphasize the usefulness of smartphones for phobia monitoring. Considering their intrinsic characteristics, smartphones may constitute the natural evolution from the lab to more realistic contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We report on a Parkinson patient with motor fluctuations and dyskinesias in whom deep brain stimulation (DBS) of the subthalamic nucleus (STN) not only improved motor symptoms but also pre-existing arachnophobia. Arachnophobia had been unchanged by the course of Parkinson's disease but rapidly improved with STN-DBS. Both, motor effects and the improvement of arachnophobia were stable during 2 years follow-up. To our knowledge this is the first report on STN stimulation effects on a specific phobia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Spider-phobic individuals are characterized by exaggerated expectancies to be faced with spiders (so-called encounter expectancy bias). Whereas phobic responses have been linked to brain systems mediating fear, little is known about how the recruitment of these systems relates to exaggerated expectancies of threat. We used fMRI to examine spider-phobic and control participants while they imagined visiting different locations in a forest after having received background information about the likelihood of encountering different animals (spiders, snakes, and birds) at these locations. Critically, imagined encounter expectancies modulated brain responses differently in phobics as compared with controls. Phobics displayed stronger negative modulation of activity in the lateral prefrontal cortex, precuneus, and visual cortex by encounter expectancies for spiders, relative to snakes or birds (within-participants analysis); these effects were not seen in controls. Between-participants correlation analyses within the phobic group further corroborated the hypothesis that these phobia-specific modulations may underlie irrationality in encounter expectancies (deviations of encounter expectancies from objective background information) in spider phobia; the greater the negative modulation a phobic participant displayed in the lateral prefrontal cortex, precuneus, and visual cortex, the stronger was her bias in encounter expectancies for spiders. Interestingly, irrationality in expectancies reflected in frontal areas relied on right rather than left hemispheric deactivations. Our data accord with the idea that expectancy biases in spider phobia may reflect deficiencies in cognitive control and contextual integration that are mediated by right frontal and parietal areas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recently, responses to looming visual stimuli have been shown to depend on the emotional content of the stimulus. A threatening stimulus is judged to arrive sooner compared to a neutral stimulus, possibly buying the organism time to prepare defensive actions. Here, we explored the underlying mechanism. We found that time-to-contact judgments of threatening pictures did not differ from those of highly arousing pleasant pictures (Experiment 1), suggesting that arousal, not fear, modulates the perception of looming. Specific fear modulated the effects of arousal (Experiment 2): Spider-fearful participants' judgments showed a threat advantage effect, while non-fearful participants' judgments were less affected by emotional content. In Experiment 3, arrival times were less overestimated when pictures induced arousal. However, this effect interacted with the valence of the stimulus: For unpleasant stimuli, arousal induced shorter time-to-contact judgments, whereas for pleasant stimuli, an inverted U-shaped relation was found. We propose a general content effect to explain the overestimation with neutral pictures: Pictorial content may draw visual attention to inner contours instead of to the outer edges of the picture. This could delay time-to-contact judgments according to the known size-arrival effect. Our results add to the growing literature examining affective influences on visual perception. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background & Objectives: The Implicit Relational Assessment Procedure (IRAP) is a widely used measure of implicit cognition which has detected biases pertaining to various psychological constructs from spider fear to cocaine dependence. One issue which emerges in the IRAP literature is that of participants failing to meet or uphold the necessary criteria to complete the IRAP, which results in their elimination from the study, which can be rather detrimental to results. The present study sought to delineate which factors may contribute to high attrition rates in IRAP research. Methodology: A previously used IRAP measuring spider fear was employed along with an n-back task and a series of questionnaires. Results: Results indicated that the ability to inhibit prepotent responses and focus attention on the task at hand was the best predictor of accuracy on the IRAP, irrespective of spider fear or current levels of anxiety. Conclusions: These results are promising for the use of the IRAP in clinically-relevant domains as they suggest that the psychopathology of participants does not affect performance on the IRAP. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The relative impact of control-, acceptance-, and information-based approaches in targeting a midlevel fear of spiders among college students was evaluated. Participants listened to a brief protocol presenting one of the three approaches before completing the Perceived-Threat Behavioral Approach Test (PT-BAT; Cochrane, Barnes-Holmes, & Barnes-Holmes, 2008). During the PT-BAT, participants placed their hands in a series of opaque jars that they were led to believe were increasingly likely to contain a spider. Participants in the acceptance-based condition progressed the farthest and were more willing to repeat the procedure a week later, despite not differing from their counterparts in levels of subjective distress. Implications for the relative efficacy of acceptance- versus control-based approaches in treatment of specific phobia, their possible differential mechanisms of action, and the use of the PT-BAT as a dependent measure in further research are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]