墨尔本PTE素材库——Fear of Spiders Makes Them Look Bigger

墨尔本PTE素材库——Fear of Spiders Makes Them Look Bigger

中文批注

这段Podcast讲解了一个很有趣的现象：对蜘蛛的恐惧可能会让你觉得它们看起来更大一些。一位古里安大学的心里学家在和同事一起遭遇了一只蜘蛛之后发现，自己非常恐惧蜘蛛，而觉得蜘蛛看起来非常“大”，而完全不怕蜘蛛的同事则觉得蜘蛛非常“小”。到底是什么造成了这样的差异呢？恐惧在这个过程中起到了怎样的作用呢？身为心理学家的她决定研究这个有趣的现象。

澳大利亚语言学院会定期整理一些PTE的素材库，让各位PTE的考生，能够在平时练习的时候就能接触到一些和official questions criteria相近的话题素材，不但能够锻炼PTE考生的听力和复述的能力，也能在消化每篇素材的过程中提高自己的阅读能力以及词汇量。例如这段材料，就非常适合用来练习Re-tell Lecture，文章中不乏一些生词，但是类似arachnid这样的生词并不会影响整体文章的理解，并且你可以从文章中推测出它们大概是什么含义，在正常考试的Re-tell Lecture部分也会出现这类生僻单词。所以各位同学一定要锻炼自己这方面的能力。

【Key Vocabulary】

encounter n. 遭遇，偶然遇见

magnitude n. 大小，量级

participant n. 参与者

arachnid n. 蛛形纲动物

phobic adj. 恐惧的，病态性恐惧的

miscalculate v. 算错，估计错误

Full Transcript

Arachnophobic study subjects estimated the size of spiders as bigger than did people who do not fear the eight-legged beasties. Jason Goldman reports.

“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.

“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.”

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?

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.

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.]

“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?”

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.

—Jason G. Goldman

(Source: http://www.scientificamerican.com/podcast/episode/fear-of-spiders-makes-them-look-bigger/)