Fear of Cockroaches

Why cockroaches rate worse than spiders

A study published in 2021 set out to fill a gap in the tools. Research on emotion depends on standardised sets of images, and the sets in use did not include cockroaches, which made them unusable for a whole class of small-animal phobia work. The authors collected 240 images of five animals, cockroaches, spiders, snakes, cats and butterflies, and had 424 participants rate each one for valence and arousal.

Cockroach pictures were rated significantly more unpleasant than every other category, including the two animals that carry almost all of the phobia literature. Women rated the cockroach, spider and snake images more negatively than men did, and rated the cockroach images as more arousing.

The paper's own conclusion is the useful one: the negative valence of cockroach images exceeds that of the snakes and spiders typically used in phobia research, and the omission of cockroaches from the standard sets was a real gap rather than an oversight of no consequence.

Why the reaction does not track danger

Rachel Nuwer put the arithmetic plainly in a BBC piece in September 2014. Cockroaches wallow in filth, and a case of food poisoning is roughly the worst outcome if one walks across a slice of pizza. Set against malaria, yellow fever or dengue, all carried by an insect nobody rates as more unpleasant, that is, in her phrase, a stroll through the park.

So the animal ranked most repellent in a controlled rating study is not close to the most dangerous insect a person will meet. Whatever the reaction tracks, it is not risk, which is the standard argument for disgust rather than fear as the operative emotion here.

Where the word katsaridaphobia came from

Wiktionary put katsaridaphobia through its verification process between February and March 2021 and the entry survived. The discussion is more informative than the outcome.

The editor who raised it noted only a few mentions in the usual books, uses on Google Scholar of doubtful independence, and the fact that the word is built on a modern Greek noun rather than an ancient one, which suggests somebody made it up recently to fill a perceived hole. The earliest trace he could find was the Phobia List, posted online in 1994.

The editor who saved it made a related point while doing so: many of the scholarly hits refer to work on augmented reality systems, so only one of those was used, to keep the citations independent of each other. A word can be cited repeatedly by a single research programme and still not be in use.

Where katsaridaphobia is actually used

The independent citations point one way. A 2016 review in Psicologia Clínica examines virtual reality exposure therapy across five phobias:

• Agoraphobia
• arachnophobia
• Claustrophobia
• katsaridaphobia
• fear of driving

It compares the procedures with behaviour-analytic psychotherapy. An essay in the Southern Review in 2017 describes an entomologist in Gainesville, Florida, helping a woman overcome a lifelong case.

That is the setting the word actually lives in: exposure work, and specifically the virtual and augmented kind. A cockroach is difficult to produce on demand in a consulting room and easy to render on a screen, which is why the treatment literature reached for the animal and then needed a name for the fear.

Which names the insect carries

Katsaridaphobia comes from the modern Greek word people use for the insect. Blattophobia comes from Blatta, the name zoologists gave it. One name was built by somebody describing a fear and the other by somebody describing an animal, and the difference in register is the difference between a phobia list and a taxonomy.