0000000000020122
AUTHOR
Carsten Diener
Cough is dangerous : neural correlates of implicit body symptoms associations
The negative interpretation of body sensations (e.g., as sign of a severe illness) is a crucial cognitive process in pathological health anxiety (HA). However, little is known about the nature and the degree of automaticity of this interpretation bias. We applied an implicit association test (IAT) in 20 subjects during functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to investigate behavioral and neural correlates of implicit attitudes towards symptom words. On the behavioral level, body symptom words elicited strong negative implicit association effects, as indexed by slowed reaction times when symptom words were paired with the attribute harmless (incongruent condition) relative to a control …
Health anxiety and hypochondriasis in the light of DSM-5.
Background: In the DSM-5, the diagnosis of hypochondriasis was replaced by two new diagnositic entities: somatic symptom disorder (SSD) and illness anxiety disorder (IAD). Both diagnoses share high health anxiety as a common criterion, but additonal somatic symptoms are only required for SSD but not IAD.Design: Our aim was to provide empirical evidence for the validity of these new diagnoses using data from a case–control study of highly health-anxious (n = 96), depressed (n = 52), and healthy (n = 52) individuals.Results: The individuals originally diagnosed as DSM-IV hypochondriasis predominantly met criteria for SSD (74%) and rarely for IAD (26%). Individuals with SSD were more impaired,…
Elektronische Tagebücher optimieren die Kognitive Verhaltenstherapie bei Krankheitsängsten : eine randomisiert-kontrollierte Studie
Zentrale Komponenten in kognitiv-behavioralen Erklärungsmodellen der Hypochondrie und den daraus abgeleiteten Behandlungen sind eine selektive Aufmerksamkeitslenkung auf körperliche Empfindungen und ein katastrophisierender Symptominterpretationsbias. Wir untersuchten, ob sich die Effektivität einer störungsspezifischen Kognitiven Verhaltenstherapie (KVT) für Patienten mit Hypochondrie durch ein zusätzliches zweiwöchiges elektronisches Tagebuchtraining (TBT), das auf eine Korrektur der Symptominterpretationen abzielt, verbessern lässt. Zu diesem Zweck wurden 35 Patienten mit Hypochondrie randomisiert zwei Interventionsformen zugewiesen: Gruppe 1 (N = 16) erhielt vor der KVT (16 Einzelsitzu…
Neuronal and Behavioral Correlates of Health Anxiety: Results of an Illness-Related Emotional Stroop Task
<b><i>Background:</i></b> Health anxiety (HA) is defined as the objectively unfounded fear or conviction of suffering from a severe illness. Predominant attention allocation to illness-related information is regarded as a central process in the development and maintenance of HA, yet little is known about the neuronal correlates of this attentional bias. <b><i>Methods:</i></b> An emotional Stroop task with body symptom, illness, and neutral words was employed to elicit emotional interference in healthy participants with high (HA+, n = 12) and low (HA–, n = 12) HA during functional magnetic resonance imaging. <b><i>Results:</i>…
Cognitive Biases in Pathological Health Anxiety
Pathological health anxiety refers to the medically unfounded fear of suffering from a severe illness. Differences in cognitive processes related to attention, memory, and evaluation of health threat have been hypothesized to underlie pathological health anxiety. In no study, however, have researchers systematically and simultaneously assessed different cognitive biases. On the basis of the idea that multiple cognitive biases simultaneously contribute to psychopathology (the combined-cognitive-bias hypothesis), we compared 88 patients with pathological health anxiety, 52 patients with depressive disorder, and 52 healthy participants on their performance in several cognitive tasks involving…
Neural correlates of an attentional bias to health-threatening stimuli in individuals with pathological health anxiety
Background: An attentional bias to health-threat stimuli is assumed to represent the primary pathogenetic factor for the development and maintenance of pathological health anxiety (PHA; formerly termed “hypochondriasis”). However, little is known about the neural basis of this attentional bias in individuals with PHA.Methods: A group of patients with PHA, a group of depressed patients and a healthy control group completed an emotional Stroop task with health-threat (body symptom and illness) words and neutral control words while undergoing functional MRI.Results: We included 33 patients with PHA, 28 depressed patients and 31 controls in our analyses. As reflected in reaction times, patients…