Selective Attention and Health Anxiety: Ill-Health Stimuli are Distracting for Everyone

Abstract

Psychological theories of anxiety are increasingly referring to information processing paradigms in order to understand the cognitive processes which underlie these disorders. Numerous studies of anxiety have demonstrated an attentional bias towards anxiety relevant stimuli. In addition, there is consistent evidence that it is more difficult to process absent than present information. Prior research has suggested that both these processing biases contribute to the maintenance of health anxiety. The present study investigated differences in attentional processing between participants high and low in health anxiety, using two visual search tasks. The visual search tasks used either letters (domain free stimuli), or words (anxietyrelated stimuli). Both low and high health anxious participants demonstrated poorer performance for target absent than target present trials. In addition, all participants showed an attentional bias towards ill-health words over good-health, negative, positive, or neutral words. These results suggest that concern about health is relevant to all people regardless of level of health anxiety.

Attentional processing of information related to illness: Biases and associations with emotional response in young adults with different levels of illness anxiety

“…Irrespective of IA levels, results support that illness stimuli are perceived as a potent source of threat and are in line with previous research (Jacoby et al, 2016; Lee et al, 2013; Lees et al, 2005; Shields and Murphy, 2011). This finding is theoretically supported by the premise that there is a predisposition to attend to stimuli perceived as threatening within the environment (e.g.…”

Attentional bias toward health-threat in health anxiety: a systematic review and three-level meta-analysis

“…The absence of differences in attentional bias toward healththreat words between high and low health-anxious participants was supported by a visual search study (Shields & Murphy, 2011). Nevertheless, in all modified Stroop studies but two (Karademas et al, 2008), individuals with self-reported or clinically diagnosed high health anxiety (i.e.…”

“…Kim, Kim, & Lee, 2014), namely a combination of health-related threatening and non-threatening stimuli. Further, for the meta-analysis, we removed another study (Shields & Murphy, 2011) that did not provide adequate data for computing an effect size.…”