 Have you ever seen those eight-legged critters, called spiders, and you instinctively made a quick jump? You're not the only one who's scared of spiders. In a report published by Graham C.L. Davey, titled Characteristics of Individuals with Fear of Spiders, 75% of people report feeling uneasy around spiders, where around 5% of people suffer from a severe fear of spiders, or arachnophobia. First off, arachnophobia is a term that refers to the extreme or irrational fear According to Healthline, this intense fear often stem from negative past experiences. So, in the case of arachnophobia, it's possible to have a debilitating fear of spiders due to a negative encounter with this atherapods. Most specific phobias like arachnophobia occur before the age of 10. Viraj Rajendra Muthia A quora contributor noted things creepy about spiders, the weird way they move. It is elegant with an unnecessarily long list of legs. Why do they need so many legs to move? That's creepy and ominous. Intelligent These are some absolutely intelligent creatures. There are spiders which make the coys of themselves to fool other animals. This spider makes fake spiders. There are peacock spiders which need to make that exact dance to mate and stay alive. There are spiders which build funnel webs. There are spiders which make little parachutes of webs to move about. They are everywhere and there are so many of them. Those little house spiders are everywhere. You can kill and kill and kill but they will be back to terrorize you. They are poison us. This is pretty self-explanatory. They are big. Some of them are huge and colorful and this does not help their case. But our fears of spiders may be unfounded because a 2012 report published on Springer Link titled Spider-Vinoms Potentially Lithol to Humans and authored by Wolfgang Nantwig and Lucia Kung Nantwig. Only 0.1% of spiders are actually venomous enough to harm humans. Every day health reports that out of the 40,000 species of spiders only a few are actually dangerous. Yet, experts admit that most people are not scared of being bitten by spiders but rather they are scared of the way spiders look. One's focus noted that one idea is that in our evolutionary past we were surrounded by spiders that were dangerously venomous and this favored our ancestors who would run a mile when something scuttled around the skirting board. The problem with this theory is that arachnophobia is much more common in Europe than in Africa or South America. An alternative hypothesis is that spiders mistakenly become associated with diseases in the Middle Ages, particularly with Black Death. This led to a cultural aversion to spiders which has been handed down through the generations ever since. But there might be a deeper reason why you are so scared of spiders. Some scientific and psychological researches actually proved that spider fear could be related to childhood trauma or genetics. You may be scared of spiders due to what scientists and psychologists call spider trauma. A study from the University of Maastricht found that something called spider trauma could be of the root of arachnophobia and extreme or irrational fear of spiders. Spider trauma refers to a scary spider related event that conditions an individual to fear arachnids. This traumatic event is often thought to occur during childhood and may even be forgotten by the person while the fear of spiders persists. In a study published in Science Direct Journal titled Common Childhood Fears and Their Origins and authored by Peter Muiris, Harold Markleback, and Ron Calleris, it was revealed that children who were highly fearful of spiders reported more scary experiences with the critters than kids who weren't as afraid of spiders. The kids in the study also reported that spiders were their tub fear with kidnapping and predators coming in second and third respectively. The 1991 study led by Graham Devy of Cine University, London, titled Characteristics of Individuals with Fear of Spiders, found that arachnophobia might be a family trait. He interviewed 118 undergraduate students about their fears of spiders. Out of the 118 participants interviewed, 75% reported being afraid of spiders. Most were female. Those people reported having a family member who was afraid of spiders. However, the study could not separate genetic factors from environmental ones. Graham Devy found that arachnophobia was in the result of specific spider trauma while it was thought that the fear of being bitten was what made spiders scary. Devy's research revealed that it is not so much a fear of being bitten, but rather the seemingly erratic movements of spiders and their legoness. Devy said animal fears may represent a functionally distinct set of adaptive responses which have been selected for during the evolutionary history of the human species. The interception of this statement, according to evolution, would mean that we may be afraid of certain animals like spiders because of our ancestors who feared and avoided potentially dangerous creatures that basically passed on the same gene to us. Graham Devy's research also found that if a participant was afraid of spiders, they were also more likely to be afraid of other commonly feared or disliked animals. Also, people of European descent with European ancestors are more likely to be afraid of spiders. This means that our fear of spiders may just basically be cultural rather than being related to a primal reaction. Psychology Today reports that arachnophobia is far more common in European countries where it was once thought that spiders carried diseases like the black plague and tyrantism and illness that allegedly made the sufferer dance uncontrollably. Psychology Today further shares that spider fear is significantly less common in non-European countries, regions as India, Africa, and amongst the aboriginal cultures of Australia. Many of the cultures in this region consider spiders to be a symbol of good luck or a culinary delicacy. In 2013, Paul Sijo, at the State University of New York and his colleague, published a study titled The Effect of Very Brief Exposure on Experienced Fear after In vivo Exposure. The study helped volunteers lessen their arachnophobia. They first split the volunteers into phobic and non-phobic groups based on simple spider fear tests. After a week of doing this test, both the groups were then exposed to images of flowers or spiders, but the exposure was for such a very short time. The idea was that people can't recognize the images consciously, but it has an effect on their subconscious. When the spider fear tests were carried out on both those groups again, those who feared spiders had become less afraid. If this video inspired you, like the video, we love you.