The Indirect Effect of Anxiety Sensitivity in terms of Intolerance of Uncertainty and Health Anxiety
Year: 2016
Type: article
Study design: Observational Study
Abstract: Health anxiety is a preoccupation with one's health without objective reason for concern and involves health-related worry, body vigilance, and excessive reassurance-seeking from physicians in order to gain certainty regarding health status.Given the role that uncertainty plays in health anxiety, researchers have demonstrated associations between intolerance of uncertainty, broadly defined as negative reactions to uncertainty, and greater health anxiety in both clinical and non-clinical populations.However, despite this well-established relationship, further work is needed to identify mechanisms that underlie this association.Given that anxiety sensitivity (AS), particularly the physical concerns domain, also negatively impacts health anxiety, AS may serve as such an explanatory factor.Thus, the purpose of the present investigation was to examine the indirect effect of AS-Physical Concerns in terms of the associations between IU and health anxiety.Participants were 640 medically healthy undergraduate students (68.1% female, M age = 19.21,SD = 2.10).A simple mediation analysis was conducted using PROCESS (Hayes, 2013) to examine the indirect effect of the predictor variables (global IU [X 1 ], prospective IU [X 2 ], and inhibitory IU [X 3 ]) on the criterion variable (SHAI [Y]) through the proposed mediator (ASI-PC [M]) using bias-corrected bootstrapping in order to directly test the significance of the indirect effect (10,000 resamples; Hayes, 2013).Consistent with hypothesis, after controlling for gender and negative affect, there was a significant indirect effect of AS-Physical Concerns in terms of the relationship between Global IU (indirect effect = .05;SE = .01;95% CI = .02to .06), and both Prospective IU (indirect effect = .04;SE = .02;95% CI = .02to .08) and Inhibitory IU (indirect effect = .11;SE = .03;95% CI = .06to .17) and health anxiety.These findings suggest that individuals who experience negative reactions to uncertainty have higher levels of health anxiety because they have a greater fear of anxiety-related sensations due their perceived negative physical consequences.iii
Author: Emily M. O’Bryan
Institution: University of Cincinnati
Language: English
Subfield: Experimental and Cognitive Psychology
Field: Psychology
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2599967706