Flipbook

CHAPTER 6 150 software (Schmitz, 2012) that they could fill out on their own computer or smartphone. Participants gave written informed consent, filled out questionnaires, 1 and gave danger ratings for twelve scenarios (see Materials). Materials Depression anxiety stress scale (DASS) The DASS (Lovibond & Lovibond, 1995b) was administered to measure anxiety. It also measures depression and stress. Each subscale consist of 14 items measured on a 0 ( never ) to 3 ( usually ) scale (range 0-42), e.g., “I felt terrified”. Cronbach’s alphas for these subscales were .91, .82, and .90, respectively, in this study. The DASS maintains its good internal consistency and inter-scale correlations when it is administered online (Zlomke, 2009). Fear of spiders questionnaire (FSQ) The FSQ (Szymanski & O'Donohue, 1995) measures self-reported spider fear. It consists of 18 statements that are rated on a 0 ( completely disagree ) to 7 ( completely agree ) scale (range 0-126), e.g., “Spiders are one of my worst fears”. Cronbach’s alpha in this study was .97. Scenarios Participants were asked to evaluate the danger of 12 scenarios on 0 ( extremely safe ) to 100 ( extremely dangerous ) Visual Analogue Scales (VAS). Scenarios described three situations: public speaking, spiders (cf. Arntz et al., 1995), and general anxiety (cf. Engelhard et al., 2002). They were adapted for the purpose of this study. Scenarios started with the same stem, for example, the spider scenarios started with “You just came back from the supermarket”. They continued with (1) objective danger information, e.g., “You bought a cluster of bananas. You know that poisonous spiders are imported with bananas. You have just seen a documentary on television about this, where those spiders were shown. At home you notice a 1-inch spider in 1 Additionally, the Fear of public speaking subscale of the Personal Report of Communication Apprehension (PRCA-24; McCroskey, 1982; see also McCroskey, Beatty, Kearney, & Plax, 1985) was administered, but these data were not used in this study.