The study takes approximately 3 hours for which you will be reimbursed with £30 plus £2.50 (for travel from within Cambridge) or £3.00 (for travel from outside Cambridge). As a thank-you for your participation, we will also give you a picture of your brain.
If you are not spider-phobic and want to participate in this study please send us an e-mail. Additionally, we will soon contact you via phone to ask whether you wish to take part in our study.
We look forward to hearing from you soon.
Hannah Eich
MRC-Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit,
15 Chaucer Road, Cambridge, CB2 7EF
Phone: 01223273768
Email: hannah.eich@mrc-cbu.cam.ac.uk
What do you have to do?
If you agree to participate in this study you will be asked to come to the MRC-Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit, 15 Chaucer Road, Cambridge, CB2 7EF for one test-day. We will ask you to fill in a number of questionnaires relating to your general health, personality, like or dislike of spiders and compatibility with scanning in a magnetic resonance imager.
Following this, we will move to the scanner room. You will be asked to lie down in the scanner and to place your foot into a custom built box. The box contains six compartments separated by sliding partitions. During the scanning, you will be able to view the boxes from a camera placed above the box. The experimenter, who will always be in the room with you, and will place a very passive and slow spider (the Brazilian Salmon Pink Tarantula) in different compartments of the box –that is closer or more distant from your foot. The tarantula will never be in the same box as your foot and will therefore not be in direct contact with you. After you have viewed the spider in the box, we will ask you to rate your levels of fear or anxiety.
During the MRI scan, we will also record your heart –rate and skin-conductance. After the task we will briefly interview you about your experience.
Following the spider study, there will be simple decision making tasks. If you feel that you cannot do the spider study, you are also welcome to take part in these decision making tasks (although priority will be given to those willing to take part in both studies).
You may withdraw from the studies at any time without explaining why.
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