Automatic Evaluative Processes in Health Anxiety and Their Relations to Emotion Regulation

Abstract

A core feature of health anxiety is a negative interpretation of illness related information. Yet, it is unknown if health anxiety also features an implicit component that can be observed with implicit measures of evaluation. In order to assess automatic evaluative processes in the domain of health anxiety, we applied the affect misattribution procedure with health-threatening prime pictures and examined the relationships to questionnaire measures of health anxiety in a student sample (N = 104). Participants rated Chinese characters significantly less often as pleasant after the presentation of health threatening primes compared with conditions featuring neutral primes or no primes. Significant correlations of the affect misattribution procedure were observed with health anxiety as measured by the Multidimensional Inventory of Hypochondriacal Traits but not with the Whiteley-Index as a global screening measure of clinically-relevant hypochondriasis. The relationships between health anxiety and the affect misattribution procedure effect remained stable after the inclusion of maladaptive emotion regulation strategies as further predictors in a hierarchical regression analysis. The findings suggest that health anxiety has an implicit component which is associated with an automatic misattribution of negative affect elicited by illness related pictures. This effect might represent a crucial component of health anxiety that fosters the automatic interpretation of illness related information in a more negative manner.