AI Article Synopsis
- Health anxiety (HA) is characterized by an unfounded fear of serious illness, influenced by biased attention to health-related information.
- A study using an emotional Stroop task revealed that individuals with high HA showed slower reactions and reduced activity in a brain area (rACC) associated with emotional regulation, compared to those with low HA.
- The findings suggest that even individuals with subclinical HA exhibit increased focus on symptoms, linked to less brain activity that normally helps manage emotional responses, leading to more obsessive thinking about health issues.
Article Abstract
Background: Health anxiety (HA) is defined as the objectively unfounded fear or conviction of suffering from a severe illness. Predominant attention allocation to illness-related information is regarded as a central process in the development and maintenance of HA, yet little is known about the neuronal correlates of this attentional bias.
Methods: An emotional Stroop task with body symptom, illness, and neutral words was employed to elicit emotional interference in healthy participants with high (HA+, n = 12) and low (HA-, n = 12) HA during functional magnetic resonance imaging.
Results: Prolonged reaction times for indicating the color of symptom words and a decrease in rostral anterior cingulate cortex (rACC) activation were seen in HA+ participants. Emotional interference effects on the behavioral level were negatively related to rACC activity over the whole group. Groups did not differ during the processing of threatening illness words.
Conclusion: The results indicate stronger attention allocation toward body symptom words already in subclinical HA. This attentional bias appears to be linked to hypoactivity of the rACC which impedes effective emotional interference reduction, leading instead to a ruminative processing of the stimulus content.
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| http://dx.doi.org/10.1159/000345545 | DOI Listing |
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