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  3. The sight of eight long black legs moving over the floor makes some people scream and run—and women are four times more likely t

The sight of eight long black legs moving over the floor makes some people scream and run—and women are four times more likely t

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问题      The sight of eight long black legs moving over the floor makes some people scream and run—and women are four times more likely to take fright than men. Now a study suggests that females are genetically prone to develop fears for potentially dangerous animals.
    David Rakison, a developmental psychologist at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, found that baby girls only 11 months old rapidly start to associate pictures of spiders with fear. Baby boys remain merrily indifferent to this connection.
    In an initial training phase Rakison showed to baby girls and boys a picture of a spider together with a fearful face. In the following test phase he let them watch the image of a spider paired with a happy face, and the image of a flower paired with a fearful face.
     Despite the spider’s happy companion, the girls looked significantly longer at it than at the flower. The researchers took this to mean that the girls expected spiders to be linked with fear. The boys looked for an equal time at both images.
     With a different group of babies, Rakison first showed a spider with a happy face, and a flower with a fearful face. Now the girls too looked at both images for the same length of time— implying that they did not have an inborn fear of spiders.
    The results suggest that girls are more inclined than boys to learn to fear dangerous animals. By contrast, says Rakison, modern phobias (恐惧) such as fear of flying or injections show no sex difference.
    He attributes the difference to behavioural differences between men and women among our hunter-gatherer ancestors. A dislike for spiders may help women avoid dangerous animals, but in men evolution seems to have favoured more risk-taking behaviour for successful hunting.
     It makes evolutionary sense to acquire spider fear at a certain age, rather than to be born with it, he adds. "There is little reason for an infant to fear an object unless it can respond to it, for example by crawling away," he says.
     But if being scared of spiders is genetically inclined, is there any point in seeing a psychiatrist? "Even if a person is heavily inclined to develop spider phobia, exposure therapy would still be effective," says Jaime Derringer, a clinical psychologist from Washington University in St. Louis. "But it may be more difficult to eliminate the association between spiders and a fearful response," she says.  
Jaime Derringer suggests that exposure therapy can most likely help ______.
选项 A、prevent one from acquiring spider phobia
B、recognize spiders in a more positive way
C、lessen one’s fear for spiders
D、eliminate the spider phobia
答案C
解析 根据末段首句和第2句的内容可以知道exposure therapy是心理医生用于治疗蜘蛛恐惧症的方法，而根据第2句中的effective，和末句的内容可以推断exposure therapy可以有效地减轻对蜘蛛的恐惧感，但却不能完全消除这种恐惧感，因此本题应选C，而同时也可排除选项D。
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