On the origin of worries about modern health hazards: Experimental evidence for a conjoint influence of media reports and personality traits.

Objective: Worries about health threatening effects of potential health hazards of modern life (e.g. electric devices and pollution) represent a growing phenomenon in Western countries.

The latent structure of the functional dyspepsia symptom complex: a taxometric analysis.

Objectives: Rome III introduced a subdivision of functional dyspepsia (FD) into postprandial distress syndrome and epigastric pain syndrome, characterized by early satiation/postprandial fullness, and epigastric pain/burning, respectively. However, evidence on their degree of overlap is mixed. We aimed to investigate the latent structure of FD to test whether distinguishable symptom-based subgroups exist.

Predictors of the application of exposure in vivo in the treatment of agoraphobia in an outpatient clinic: An exploratory approach.

Objective: Although exposure in vivo is considered to be the most effective therapy component in the treatment of agoraphobia (AG), there is a remarkable lack of its application in psychotherapeutic routine care. We examined the severity of anxiety, psychological distress/comorbidity, therapeutic process/alliance, and sociodemographic status as potential predictors of in vivo exposure.

Method: We applied correlational analyses and logistic regression analyses in a sample of N = 92 patients (main diagnosis AG) in an outpatient setting.

Clarifying the latent structure and correlates of somatic symptom distress: A bifactor model approach.

Distressing somatic symptoms are ubiquitous both in mental disorders and medical diseases. From a psychometric perspective, the structure of somatic symptom distress is unclear, and little is known about the strengths of associations to related constructs, such as health anxiety and somatosensory amplification. To clarify the structure of somatic symptom distress and to explore associations to health anxiety, somatosensory amplification, and functional somatic syndromes, data sets of 2 samples of college students from Germany (N = 1,520) and Switzerland (N = 3,053) were investigated with confirmatory factor analysis with robust estimation.

Latent structure of irritable bowel syndrome symptom severity.

Aim: To investigate the latent structure of an irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) symptom severity scale in a population of healthy adults.

Methods: The Birmingham IBS symptom questionnaire which consists of three symptom specific scales (diarrhea, constipation, pain) was evaluated by means of structural equation modeling. We compared the original 3-factor solution to a general factor model and a bifactor solution in a large internet sample of college students (n = 875).