字神帝國英語天地

 
 今日主題：Fear of Spiders Makes Them Look Bigger  越恐懼越害怕

 洪欣老師推薦：托福聽力最好的課外教材：60-Second Science
 康康精選托福會考的主題，堅持每天精聽一定會進步的哦!!

 建議方法：
1. 先聽兩三遍 (不看文稿)
2. 再一句一句聽寫 (每句都要聽寫數遍，直到寫出85%以上的字)
3. 最後check文稿，看哪聽不出來，單字沒背過，還是發音不熟。
4. 堅持天天聽，就能每天進步哦。

 MP3音檔 (按右鍵可下載聽)：喜歡的同學，幫忙推或按讚哦~~
http://online1.tingclass.net/voaspe/…/20160402sa_science.mp3

 只有音檔怎夠，聽不懂地方，不用怕，康康幫你準備好中英文稿了：

 中英文稿：
“Both of us were in the lab when we just saw a spider, and I'm really afraid of them. So I started to scream for her to come and pick it up because she's not afraid of them.”
“我看到蜘蛛時，那時我們兩都在實驗室，我真的非常害怕蜘蛛。所以我就開始大聲尖叫讓她來幫我把蜘蛛弄走，因為她不害怕蜘蛛。”

Ben-Gurion University of the Negev psychologist Tali Leibovich, talking about herself and a colleague.
班古里昂大學的內蓋夫心理學家Tali Leibovich，談論了自己和同事的經歷。

“And she said, 'but it's small, how come you're afraid of it?' And I said, 'no it's huge!' And she said 'it's small'; I said 'it's huge.' We started arguing, and this is why we started this study. To see who is right."
“我的同事說，蜘蛛就那麼小，你怎麼會害怕它呢?”我說，不，它那麼大。她說蜘蛛很小的，但我則說，蜘蛛很大。我們開始爭論起來。為了證明誰的觀點是對的，我進行了這項研究。

Leibovich does not ordinarily study spiders. But this spider encounter made her curious about how the human brain understands magnitude—what are the factors that influence our estimation of how big or small something is? And does fear play a role?
Leibovich並沒有研究蜘蛛。但是這次偶遇蜘蛛的經歷讓她開始好奇人類的大腦如何理解大小——究竟是哪些因素在影響我們評判事物大小的標準的呢?恐懼是否也起作用呢?

So she and colleagues did an experiment in which participants had to say how big a spider in a photo was on a scale from housefly to goat. And the subjects who were afraid of spiders consistently rated the arachnids as larger than did the non-phobic participants.
所以她和同事做了一個實驗。實驗中，參與者必須說出照片的中蜘蛛與家蠅以及山羊相比的大小。與不害怕蜘蛛的參與者相比，害怕的實驗物件總認為蜘蛛較大。

But the spider-phobes did not miscalculate the size of butterflies or birds. Nor did they see wasps as larger-than-life, even though wasps can be dangerous. The estimation error was spider-specific. It seems our emotions drive us to experience the same world in very different ways. The results are in the journal Biological Psychology.
但是蜘蛛恐懼症並不會錯誤判斷蝴蝶或者鳥類的體型。同時，儘管黃蜂非常的危險，他們也不會認為黃蜂比實際偏大。這種錯誤的估計只是針對蜘蛛的。似乎我們的情感讓我們用不同的方式體驗同一世界。該研究結果發表在《生物心理學》雜誌上。

"Now we can ask the question of what causes what? Is it the fear of spiders that makes you see them as larger, or first you see them as larger for some reason and because of it you start being afraid of them?"
“現在。我們可以問問原因是什麼呢?是因為對害怕蜘蛛讓你覺得他們體積變大，還是因為第一次看到蜘蛛時，就覺得它們體積較大，你然後就開始害怕?”

If it's the latter, then perhaps spider-phobes can be trained to more accurately judge the size of the arachnids, and maybe that could ease their worries. Some might even come to see spiders as actually kind of cool—or at least not downright terrifying.
如果是後者，那麼也許蜘蛛恐懼症可以通過訓練更準確地判斷蜘蛛的大小，這樣也許能緩解他們的擔憂。有些人甚至認為，看蜘蛛很酷啊——至少不是很怕啊。