Could fear of arthropods be a relic of survival instincts from our distant Palaeozoic ancestors?

Psychologist once theorized that the fear of any animal may have had instinctive roots.

Studies show that is not the case at all.

Simply put, no one is born with these fears, or everybody would suffer entomophobia, arachnophobia etc.

The fear of animals, weather snakes,insects, or spiders is a learned response, usually passed from parents or other people during initial growing/learning years.

Truth is, our early ancestors likely fed on arthropods and smaller animals.

your response to the cellar spider is simply that you had never seen one before, nor knew anything about them.

I grew up playing with bugs and spiders of all sorts, so I never developed any fear of arthropods.

I had never seen a potato bug (Jerusalem cricket) until I moved to southern California, and one evening, I saw this huge scary bug in the yard that scared the daylights out of me.

A neighbor said"oh, that's a potato bug, they are harmless"

I caught the critter in a jar, then read about them, and kept it for a pet.

After getting familiar with these bugs, I find I really like them, and not bad at all.(yes, they can bite if mis handled)

This is something I could have developed a fear of, but in getting to know them, now there is no chance of that.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7YHxIlKlWfc

As for your cellar spider, they are perhaps the most common house spider worldwide, and most people welcome them.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dudlGvVhsXQ

Yes, we even have instincts that date back to the time we were tree climbing primates. For example, human infants have the instinct to grab on to any object, and they grab onto hair or ropes especially tightly. This instinct evolved because infant, tree climbing primates have to hang on to the fur of their mothers or else they will fall to their deaths. Even though humans no longer climb trees, we still retain this instinct.

I am not sure about any instinctive fear of arthropods. In fact, I personally have no instinctive fear of spiders. If you go to some Asian countries, there is even sports of spider and cricket fighting (crickets are also arthropods). People who fight spiders build a small enclosure with a plant with a stiff blade-like leaf and carry this with the spider inside their pockets. If there is fear of spiders, it would be unthinkable for anyone to put something containing spiders inside their pockets. Many phoebias or irrational fears are learned behavior, not instinctive. Arachnophobia, or the irrational fear of spiders, is called a phobia because it is irrational. It means most people really have no fear of spiders, and those who fear spiders learned to fear them.

Some scientists even believe that humans have a fear of snakes. As evidence, they performed an experiment in which they show infants pictures of various objects, and found that infants pay the most attention to snakes. They interpret this as evidence of an instinctive fear of snakes. What these researchers do not realize is that infants are attracted by rope-like objects, as noted above, because of the instinct to hold onto anything that is long and thin. Scroll down the page shown in the link and see some amazing pictures of infants acting out their instinct to hold tightly onto ropes.

Yes I think so. That meets up with the idea of human needs: you get to join a special club, someone is always looking out for you, you're promised a better life than the shitty existance you've got now... religion fulfills these things. However so does recreational drug use and prostitutes but that doesn't mean its a good thing.

I doubt it. It's possible, I suppose, but lots of other animals which split off the track we followed long before primates separated from other mammals, don't show this sort of thing.