Attentional bias toward personally relevant health-threat words

Abstract

Conflicting findings have emerged regarding the presence of attentional biases (ABs) in health anxiety, probably due to methodological limitations in the stimuli used in cognitive tasks and the assessment of health anxiety-relevant factors. The current study sought to examine ABs toward health-related threats using idiographically chosen health-threat words in a non-clinical sample. A modified dot-probe task using idiographically selected health-threat words was administered to an undergraduate sample. Self-report measures were administered to assess somatic, cognitive, and behavioral aspects of health anxiety, in addition to assessing negative affect, anxiety sensitivity, and experience of actual medical conditions. Results showed that behavioral and somatic aspects of health anxiety were significantly associated with AB toward personally relevant threat words, even after controlling for negative affect, anxiety sensitivity, and experience of actual medical conditions. Additional analyses revealed that these biases reflected difficulty disengaging attention from threat rather than a facilitated detection of threat. In contrast, illness-related cognitions were found to be unrelated to ABs. These findings suggest an association between threat-related ABs and excessive health-care seeking efforts.

Are you a health care and information seeker or avoider? A new assessment tool

“…This finding supports our initial concern that questions used to assess the frequency of healthcare visits over a specified period of time (e.g. Afolabi et al, 2013;Kannan & Veazie, 2014;Lee et al, 2013;Ye et al, 2012) may not capture healthcare seeking and avoidance as behavioral response patterns to perceived health threats. This appears to be particularly observed for healthcare avoidance behaviors, i.e.…”

“…In existing studies, researchers asked participants to report the frequency with which they sought medical care or information over a specified period of time (e.g. during the last 1-3 months; Afolabi et al, 2013;Kannan & Veazie, 2014;Lee et al, 2013;Ye et al, 2012). In spite of providing a snapshot of the frequency of these behaviors, this data collection approach does not help to uncover the function of healthcare seeking.…”

“…The HCSUS is a 7-item self-report measure constructed to assess the number of attempts to seek and utilize healthcare resources over the past month, including phone calls to healthcare professionals, visits in non-emergent and emergent healthcare settings, prescriptions received, days in inpatient treatment and hours per week spent searching for medical information. It demonstrated adequate internal consistency and utility as a measure of behavioral illness anxiety symptoms (Lee et al, 2013).…”

“…The HCBQ items were developed based on existing literature about healthcare seeking and avoidance behaviors mainly from studies in the field of health psychology and illness anxiety. Some items were adapted from the Illness Attitudes Scales (Kellner, 1987) and questions used in previous studies assessing healthcare seeking and avoidance behaviors (Afolabi et al, 2013;Kannan & Veazie, 2014;Lee et al, 2013;Ye et al, 2012). More items were developed based on the initial items following published guidelines for item construction (Rattray & Jones, 2007;Siniscalco & Auriat, 2005).…”

Neural correlates of an attentional bias to health-threatening stimuli in individuals with pathological health anxiety

“…These correlations suggest that body symptom information apparently acquires specific salience linked to increased negative emotional arousal and biased attention in patients with PHA. 23,49,50 However, it should be kept in mind that despite the medium effect size, these correlations would not be significant after correction for multiple comparisons. Moreover, these results give evidence for an exaggerated amygdala activity in response to body symptom stimuli as the neural basis of the fear response that causes behavioural neutralization reactions, such as body checking behaviour, to reduce the emotional reaction.…”