A comparison of habituation to fear and habituation to disgust among spider phobics

This study examined the role that disgust plays in the treatment of a spider phobia. The current study had 30 spider phobics who were randomly assigned to one of two experimental groups. The first group was exposed to the feared stimulus (live tarantula) while the second group was exposed to a core disgust stimulus (dead rat). With the exposure exercise, participants also completed the SPQ, DS, and two behavioral avoidance tests where the participants approached either the rat or the tarantula. Results indicated that habituating a participant to either the disgusting stimulus or to the live tarantula caused fear, avoidance, and disgust levels to decrease significantly. These results demonstrated that although habituation to the feared stimulus caused spider fear to decrease more substantially than exposure to the core disgust stimulus, habituation to a core disgust stimulus may also be an effective treatment method for a specific phobia of spiders.