Research has provided controversial results regarding the role of distraction (vs. attentional focus) during exposure therapy. In the present study, we manipulated the nature of the concepts activated during exposure. Sixty-six spider phobics were exposed to pictures of spiders and asked, or not, to form mental images of concepts that were either related or unrelated to spiders. At pre-exposure...

Spiders are arthropods that can be distinguished from their closest relatives, the insects, by counting their legs. Spiders have 8, insects just 6. Spider graphs are a very restricted class of graphs that naturally appear in the context of cograph editing. The vertex set of a spider (or its complement) is naturally partitioned into a clique (the body), an independent set (the legs), and a rest ...

In this study, we investigated to what extent indirect measures predict behavioural and physiological fear responses towards spiders. Implicit attitudes towards spiders were assessed using an implicit association test and attentional bias towards spiders was assessed using a dot probe task and a disengagement task. Results showed that a self report measure of fear for spiders, but not the indir...

Jumping spiders (Salticidae) are renowned dancers, but until recently, the music of their courtship was thought to fall on deaf ears. No one had heard of spiders being able to perceive sounds until a recent serendipitous finding published in Current Biology by Ronald Hoy and colleagues from Cornell University, USA. Having previously shown that the spiders rely heavily on vision as they strut th...

Some species have sensory systems divided into subsystems with morphologically different sense organs that acquire different types of information within the same modality. Jumping spiders (family Salticidae) have eight eyes. Four eyes are directed anteriorly to view objects in front of the spider: a pair of principal eyes track targets with their movable retinae, while the immobile anterior lat...

The negative impacts of non-native species are well documented; however, the ecological outcomes of invasions can vary widely. In order to determine the resilience of local communities to invasion by non-native spiders, we compared spider assemblages from areas with varying numbers of non-native spiders in California coastal sage scrub. Spiders were collected from pitfall traps over 2 years. Pr...

Prior to the publication of the book reviewed here, the only books dealing specifically with fossil spiders have been primarily taxonomic monographs, such as those on Dominican and Baltic amber inclusions by Wunderlich (1988, 2004), or broader palaeobiological studies on a particular assemblage, such as Dominican amber spiders by Penney (2008). The coverage of fossil spiders in books on extant ...

Terrestrial spiders transfer methyl mercury (MeHg) to terrestrial consumers such as birds, but how spiders become contaminated with MeHg is not well understood. In the present study, the authors used stable isotopes of nitrogen in combination with MeHg to determine the source of MeHg to terrestrial long-jawed orb weaver spiders (Tetragnatha sp). The authors collected spiders and a variety of ot...

Ss were presented with spiders running from left to right at various velocities over a structured background. Motion of the background influenced the perceived velocity of the spider: Motion of the background in the opposite direction than the spider increased the perceived velocity. The perceived position of the spider was not influenced by background motion. Ss were asked to hit the spiders a...

Melanin pigments are broadly distributed in nature - from bacteria to fungi to plants and animals. However, many previous attempts to identify melanins in spiders were unsuccessful, suggesting that these otherwise ubiquitous pigments were lost during spider evolution. Yet, spiders exhibit many dark colours similar to those produced by melanins in other organisms, and the low solubility of melan...