Relationships between fear of COVID‐19, cyberchondria, intolerance of uncertainty, and obsessional probabilistic inferences: A structural equation model

Abstract

The study was set out to explore the structural relationships between fear of COVID‐19, cyberchondria, intolerance of uncertainty, and obsessional probabilistic inferences. The data were recruited online from a community population ( n = 1,049) subjected to a confirmatory factor analytic procedure. The structural model specified according to the previous findings in the literature showed that a general tendency to negative expectations in terms of probabilistic thinking was significantly associated with both COVID‐19‐related‐fear and intolerance of uncertainty. Fear of COVID‐19 was significantly associated with cyberchondria. Probabilistic thinking style and intolerance of uncertainty contributed to cyberchondria through fear of COVID‐19 as well. We concluded that a tendency to engage in a probabilistic thinking style and intolerance of uncertainty seems to play role in the etiology of fear of infection and cyberchondria.