Children’s nighttime fear is hypothesized as a cognitive relict reflecting a long history of natural selection for anticipating the direction of nighttime predatory attacks on the presumed human ancestor, Australopithecus afarensis, whose small-bodied females nesting in trees would have anticipated predatory attacks from below. Heavier males nesting on the ground would have anticipated nighttime predatory attacks from their sides. Previous research on preschool children and adults supports this cognitive-relict hypothesis by showing developmental consistencies in their remembrances of the location of a “scary thing” relative to their beds. The current study expands this research by investigating whether nighttime fear in childhood, including the effect of parental threats to behave, influenced adult spatial fears in different biotic and abiotic situations. A 25-item questionnaire employing ordinal scales was given to 474 foreign-born Vietnamese and ethnic Chinese adults living in the USA. Univariate analyses of adult remembrances of childhood indicated that females were more fearful of something scary below their beds than males. To examine the influence of childhood nighttime fear on adult fears, exploratory factor analyses supported three factors: (1) indeterminate agents, indicated something scary under the bed, the difficulty locating unspecific threats, and the brief appearances of large apparitions; (2) environmental uncertainty, indicated by potential encounters with unseen animate threats; (3) predictable animals, as the relative comfort of viewing animals in zoo exhibits. Using structural equation modeling, the results suggest that childhood nighttime fear influenced only the latent variable, indeterminate agents, in both groups via the mediating variable, parental threats.

儿童夜间恐惧被假设为一种认知残余，反映了自然选择的悠久历史，以预测夜间对假定的人类祖先南方古猿阿法种的掠夺性攻击的方向，其在树上筑巢的体型较小的雌性会预料到来自下方的掠夺性攻击。筑巢在地面上的较重的雄性会预料到夜间会从它们的身边发起掠夺性攻击。先前对学龄前儿童和成人的研究通过显示他们对“可怕的东西”相对于他们的床的位置的记忆的发展一致性来支持这种认知残留假设。目前的研究通过调查童年的夜间恐惧（包括父母威胁行为的影响）是否会影响成人在不同生物和非生物情况下的空间恐惧，从而扩展了这项研究。对居住在美国的 474 名外国出生的越南和华裔成年人进行了使用顺序量表的 25 项问卷调查。对成人童年记忆的单变量分析表明，女性比男性更害怕床下的可怕事物。为了检查童年夜间恐惧对成人恐惧的影响，探索性因素分析支持三个因素：（1）不确定的代理，表明床下有可怕的东西，难以定位非特定威胁，以及大型幻影的短暂出现；(2) 环境的不确定性，通过潜在遭遇看不见的有生命的威胁来表明；(3) 可预测的动物，作为在动物园内观赏动物的相对舒适度。使用结构方程模型，结果表明童年夜间恐惧仅通过中介变量父母威胁影响两组中的潜在变量不确定因素。