Is health anxiety related to disease avoidance?

Abstract

Health anxiety is characterized by a persistent and debilitating worry of somatic illness, as well as of avoidance behaviours. However, little is known of the cognitive mechanisms involved. We hypothesized that a higher degree of health anxiety would relate to an altered interpretation of other people’s health status and that this would be driven by disgust and a fear for becoming sick. We recruited 225 participants with a varying degree of health anxiety (of which 132 were patients suffering from severe health anxiety). The participants rated facial photographs of other individuals with a varying degree of appeared sickness. A higher degree of health anxiety was related to perceiving other people as less healthy, being more contagious, and that they had a higher risk of becoming infected if meeting these people (p’s .05), particularly if people looked more sick. Health anxiety was also related to increased feelings of disgust and anxiety of other people (p’s .05). Our data supports that disgust and cognitive biases of other peoples’ health status are significant features of severe health anxiety. We propose that a heightened sensitivity to whether other people are contagious (pathogenic threats) or not, have been beneficial throughout evolution, allowing for “disease avoidance”, but that this can have debilitating effects in a society with many people and a high demand for social interactions.