Current Opinion in Psychiatry, in press 2 Purpose of reviewSelf-reported bodily symptoms are of primary importance in health care and in health-related research. Typically they are assessed in clinical interviews or by means of traditional questionnaire formats that require the respondent to provide retrospective symptom estimates rated along intuitive frequency and/or intensity standards and aggregated across varying or unspecified time windows. Recent findingsRetrospective symptom assessments are often biased when compared to (averaged) momentary assessments of symptoms. A variety of factors and conditions have been identified to influence the amount of bias in symptom reporting. Recent research has focused on the underlying mechanisms for the discrepancy between memory and experience. It is suggested that different types of questions and formats assess different types of information that each may be relevant for other purposes.Knowledge of these underlying mechanisms also provides a relevant framework to better understand individual differences in symptom reporting, including somatoform and somatic symptom disorder. SummaryAccuracy of self-reported bodily symptoms is important for the clinician and the researcher. Understanding the mechanisms underlying bias may be provide an interesting window to understand how symptom episodes are processed, encoded and consolidated in memory and provide clues to modify symptom experiences.

Precarious manhood beliefs portray manhood, relative to womanhood, as a social status that is hard to earn, easy to lose, and proven via public action. Here, we present cross-cultural data on a brief measure of precarious manhood beliefs (the Precarious Manhood Beliefs scale [PMB]) that covaries meaningfully with other cross-culturally validated gender ideologies and with country-level indices of gender equality and human development. Using data from university samples in 62 countries across 13 world regions ( N = 33,417), we demonstrate: (1) the psychometric isomorphism of the PMB (i.e., its comparability in meaning and statistical properties across the individual and country levels); (2) the PMB’s distinctness from, and associations with, ambivalent sexism and ambivalence toward men; and (3) associations of the PMB with nation-level gender equality and human development. Findings are discussed in terms of their statistical and theoretical implications for understanding widely-held beliefs about the precariousness of the male gender role.

BackgroundThe degree to which episodic and semantic memory processes contribute to retrospective self-reports have been shown to depend on the length of reporting period. Robinson and Clore (2002) argued that when the amount of accessible detail decreases due to longer reporting periods, an episodic retrieval strategy is abandoned in favor of a semantic retrieval strategy. The current study further examines this shift between retrieval strategies by conceptually replicating the model of Robinson and Clore (2002) for both emotions and symptoms and by attempting to estimate the exact moment of the theorized shift.MethodA sample of 469 adults reported the extent to which they experienced 8 states (excited, happy, calm, sad, anxious, angry, pain, stress) over 12 time frames (right now to in general). A series of curvilinear and piecewise linear multilevel growth models were used to examine the pattern of response times and response levels (i.e., rated intensity on a 1–5 scale) across the different time frames.ResultsReplicating previous results, both response times and response levels increased with longer time frames. In contrast to prior work, no consistent evidence was found for a change in response patterns that would suggest a shift in retrieval strategies (i.e., a flattening or decrease of the slope for longer time frames). The relationship between the time frames and response times/levels was similar for emotions and symptoms.ConclusionsAlthough the current study showed a pronounced effect of time frame on response times and response levels, it did not replicate prior work that suggested a shift from episodic to semantic memory as time frame duration increased. This indicates that even for longer time frames individuals might attempt to retrieve episodic information to provide a response. We suggest that studies relying on self-report should use the same well-defined time frames across all self-reported measures.

Our findings show that even though memory for pain and dyspnea is overall distorted, the extent of bias in symptom recall clearly differs between symptoms and groups. The observed increase of dyspnea reporting over time may have important implications for diagnostic assessment based on symptom reporting.

The Heartbeat Counting Task (HCT) was designed and is intended to measure the objective ability to detect cardiac signals (also called cardiac interoceptive accuracy). Because interoceptive accuracy is thought to play a key role in biological (e.g., body mass index) and psychological (e.g., trait anxiety) risk factors and indicators of mental health, HCT scores should be associated with these outcomes. In order to examine this question, we performed a meta-analysis on these associations among adult participants. The final data set comprised 133 studies with 11,524 participants. We focused here on the seven most studied outcomes (i.e., outcomes that were studied in at least ten published studies). HCT performance was not significantly associated with trait anxiety, depression, and alexithymia. It was weakly and negatively associated with age after correction for publication bias, sex (male > female), heart rate, and body mass index. In addition, the quality assessment indicates that only a few studies reported sample size justification (6%), pre-registration (0.8%), and data in free access (6.8%). Theoretically expected associations between HCT performance and psychological indicators of mental health were not meta-analytically found. We discuss the implications of these findings for practice and theory.