ArticleScientific reports2024
Health anxiety amplifies fearful responses to illness-related imagery.
Article in Scientific reports, 2024. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 5 papers.
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Who cites it
5 citing papers in PubMed, 11 citations in OpenAlex.
- Direct and Indirect Associations of Sociodemographic Factors and Patient-Perceived Barriers With Delayed Breast Cancer Presentation: A Cross-Sectional Path Analysis.World journal of oncology · 2026Article
- Impact of Cyberchondria on Health and Quality of Life: Scoping Review.Journal of medical Internet research · 2025Article
- Neuropsychiatric Manifestations of Long COVID-19: A Narrative Review of Clinical Aspects and Therapeutic Approaches.Life (Basel, Switzerland) · 2025Review
- The Relationship Between E-Health Literacy, Health Anxiety, Cyberchondria, and Death Anxiety in University Students That Study in Health Related Department.Journal of multidisciplinary healthcare · 2025Article
- Association between dyslipidaemia knowledge & lipid testing practice among adults, a community-based study.PloS one · 2024Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
4 authors at 2 institutions in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Severe health anxiety (HA) is characterized by excessive worry and anxiety about one's health, often accompanied by distressing intrusive imagery of signs of a serious illness or potentially receiving bad news about having a life-threatening disease. However, the emotional responses to these illness-related mental images in relation to HA have not been fully elucidated. Emotional responses to mental imagery of 142 participants were assessed in a well-controlled script-driven imagery task, systematically comparing emotional responses to illness-related imagery with neutral and standard fear imagery. The results revealed that participants reported higher anxiety, aversion, emotional arousal, and a stronger avoidance tendency during imagery of fear and illness-related scenes compared to neutral scenes. Importantly, the emotional modulation varied by the level of HA, indicating that individuals with higher HA experienced stronger emotional responses to illness-related imagery. This association between HA and fearful imagery could not be better accounted for by other psychological factors such as trait anxiety, anxiety sensitivity, somatic symptom severity, or symptoms of depression and anxiety. Fearful responding to standard threat material was not associated with HA. The present findings highlight the importance of considering fear responding to mental imagery in understanding and addressing HA.
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