Can you imagine yourself holding this tarantula?
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Getting up close and personal with a furry tarantula is probably the very last thing someone with a spider phobia would opt for, but the encounter may be the ticket to busting the brain's resistance to arachnids.
A tried-and-true exposure therapy, this one lasting just hours, changed activity in the brain's fear regions just minutes after the session was complete, researchers found.
"Before treatment, some of these participants wouldn't walk on grass for fear of spiders or would stay out of their home or dorm room for days if they thought a spider was present," said lead study author Katherina Hauner, postdoctoral fellow in neurology at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine, in a statement.
After a single therapy session lasting up to three hours, "they were able to walk right up and touch or hold a tarantula. And they could still touch it after six months," Hauner said.
Spider phobia is a type of anxiety disorder called specific phobia, which also includes phobias of blood, needles, snakes, enclosed places and others. About 9.4 percent of the U.S. population has experienced a specific phobia at some point in their lifetime, Hauner said.
Hauner told LiveScience she hopes people who have specific phobias, particularly of spiders, will realize that successful treatments are out there, and that their phobias can take just hours to cure (though some cases can take a couple weeks to cure, she noted). "It's still not easy. It involves being motivated to overcome your fear."
Spider madness
Hauner and her colleagues examined 12 adults, nine women and three men with an average age of 22, who met diagnostic criteria for having a spider phobia; their arachnid fear was so great that, before therapy, they had trouble even looking at photos of spiders. And when they did get a glimpse, each phobic's brain showed increased activity in regions linked to fear response, including the amygdala, insula and cingulated cortex, in functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scans.
When asked to touch a tarantula in a closed terrarium, participants were also too afraid to go no closer than an average of 10 feet away. [In Photos: Tarantulas Strut Their Stuff]
"They thought the tarantula might be capable of jumping out of the cage and on to them," Hauner said. "Some thought the tarantula was capable of planning something evil to purposefully hurt them."
In therapy, the participants learned about tarantulas in general and that their oversized fears of the creepy crawlies were just that. They were also guided through a multistep process that inched them closer to the enclosed tarantula until they could actually pick up and hold the spider. (At one point they touched the tarantula with a paintbrush, next while wearing a glove and eventually they pet it with their bare hands or held it.)
"I would teach them the tarantula is fragile and more interested in trying to hide herself," Hauner said.
Fearful brain changes
Minutes after therapy, participants were again shown spider photos, but this time, their fMRI scans showed less activity in the fear regions. This fear reduction persisted for six months after treatment, the researchers said.
At that six-month mark, participants were asked again to touch the terrarium-enclosed tarantula. "They walked right up to it and touched it," Hauner said. "It was amazing to see because I remembered how terrified they were initially and so much time had passed since the therapy." [What Scares You? (Infographic)]
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11 Comments
Add CommentVery curious - I wonder what physiological process could 'rewire' the brain in just a few hours?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAlternatively, I suggest that the 'software' determined brain activity is altered, as indicated by the fMRI scans that "showed less activity in the fear regions." In this case no 'hardware' "rewiring" of any neuronal circuits are required.
I suspect the ubiquitous 'hardware' oriented interpretation by fMRI experimenters results from their equating blood-oxygen flows to specific brain tissue structures ('hardware') not considering that blood-oxygen usage patterns may vary based on changes in 'software' determined functional activity levels.
Besides our possible ancestral memories printed in the so called "collective unconscious" of let us say, poisonous animals, a classical approach in arachnophobia, a phobia with a female preponderance, is considering hairy or fuzzy or furry spiders as a symbol of a male aggressor, thus spiders triggering a fear to being molested or even to rape, two very reasonable things to take precautions in front of, even when the triggering event for the fear, hair, is not necessarily connected to the actual presence of these dangers. For males, the feared scene would not be ordinarily suffering a sexual assault, but but being overthrown or something like, gender self-identification uncertainties apart. Any therapy that reduces the activation of the brain circuitry involved in fear may sound good, but as some slowing down in this kind of automated innate responses is done by selective deaths in the groups of neurons that are activated in the circumstances of the clinical fear, it may reduce the general response to danger, the thing formerly called "Selye's general adaptation syndrome", and thus impair responses that may protect the person in front of actual risks, not fears evoked by some kind of conditioned or learned response. We must not forget that the rules in the elaboration of dreams are also the rules of how the unconscious works, and a classical mechanism in this is the transfer, or contagion , of a feeling or image to anything next to it, either in time, space, sensorial perception, or even words, wordings and letters, as probably our mind gives the same value and handles in the same way the objects perceived by senses and the corresponding words or mental concepts or inner images, everything happens inside the brain, the rest are just input-output peripherals with its corresponding images and controllers in groups of neurons, and these groups of brain neurons is almost the only thing brain handles. As for any phobia, the best approach for arachnophobia would be a progressive exposition to the object or situation that triggers the anxiety, a modification that acts in a way specific for the offending fact, while preserving the general self-protection responses. Is this sound?. Salut +
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWild psychoanalysis is the name Sigmund Feurd gave to explanations or instructions as the ones in the preceding note.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWhat's new about this? Exposure therapy has been around for decades! As for "their fMRI scans showed less activity in the fear regions", how does that provide evidence for a 'rewiring of the brain'??
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe article states:
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"In therapy, the participants learned about tarantulas in general and that their oversized fears of the creepy crawlies were just that."
Specifically, how could the use of behavioral therapy produce, as you say, "slowing down in this kind of automated innate responses is done by selective deaths in the groups of neurons that are activated in the circumstances of the clinical fear" - all within a couple of hours?
What physiological process induced by behavioral therapy can produce "selected deaths in the groups of neurons..." within a couple of hours?
To a person whose only tool is a hammer - all problems appear to be nails...
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisReplace hammer & nails with fMRI & neuronal circuits...
I would greatly appreciate it if someone could show me where this is actually published.I checked the May 22 PNAS-and there is no mention that I could find of this paper.Thank you.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThis story has gotten quite a bit of pub, several articles mentioning the May 21 PNAS, including
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thishttp://www.cbsnews.com/8301-504763_162-57439325-10391704/scared-of-spiders-a-2-hour-therapy-session-may-help-study-shows/
"...the study, which was published in the May 21 issue of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences," http://www.pnas.org/
"Katherina Hauner, post-doctoral fellow in neurology at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine and lead author of the paper..." - press release: http://www.northwestern.edu/newscenter/stories/2012/05/spider-phobia.html
The press release does say that it's been published in PNAS, but gives no date. I couldn't find any mention of the research report or the author at the PNAS site, either. Perhaps it just didn't make it into the current issue, or perhaps there's something more nefarious going on...
Thank you for your comment.It is a bit strange, and hopefully not disturbing as this would be a landmark study-it published in a peer reviewed journal, and faced public scrutiny by the scientific community.Lets hope there is a typo and not a broad based lack of careful reporting.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI await a response from SA or anyone else.
Not being afraid of spiders can get you killed in some places
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisExposure therapy triggers lasting reorganization of neural fear processing.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisHauner KK, Mineka S, Voss JL, Paller KA.
Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2012 May 23. [Epub ahead of print]
PMID:22623532[PubMed - as supplied by publisher]