That Giant Tarantula Is Terrifying, but I'll Touch It

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/09/120904192045.htm

That Giant Tarantula Is Terrifying, but I'll Touch It: Expressing Your Emotions Can Reduce Fear

ScienceDaily (Sep. 4, 2012) — "Give sorrow words." -- Malcolm in Shakespeare's "Macbeth"

Can simply describing your feelings at stressful times make you less afraid and less anxious?

A new UCLA psychology study suggests that labeling your emotions at the precise moment you are confronting what you fear can indeed have that effect.

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The subjects were then divided into four groups and sat in front of another tarantula in a container in an indoor setting. In the first group, the subjects were asked to describe the emotions they were experiencing and to label their reactions to the tarantula -- saying, for example, "I'm anxious and frightened by the ugly, terrifying spider."

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In a second group, the subjects used more neutral terms that did not convey their fear or disgust and were aimed at making the experience seem less threatening. They might say, for example, "That little spider can't hurt me; I'm not afraid of it."

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In a third group, the subjects said something irrelevant to the experience, and in a fourth group, the subjects did not say anything -- they were simply exposed to the spider.

All the participants were re-tested in the outdoor setting one week later and were again asked to get closer and closer to the tarantula and potentially touch it with a finger. The researchers measured how close subjects could get to the spider, how distressed they were and what their physiological responses were, focusing in particular on how much the subjects' hands sweated, which is a good measure of fear, Craske said.

The researchers found that the first group did far better than the other three. These people were able to get closer to the tarantula -- much closer than those in the third group and somewhat closer than those in the other two groups -- and their hands were sweating significantly less than the participants in all of the other groups.