ABSTRACT
Illness anxiety disorder, formerly known as hypochondria, has been conceptualised in the psychological literature as an anxiety disorder, and its dimensional correlate is usually referred to as health anxiety. Similarly to other anxiety disorders, health anxiety has also been investigated in the context of attention biases as maintaining factors. However, so far, there is little consensus in the literature concerning the types of biases most relevant to health anxiety (i.e. facilitation, difficulty in disengaging, or avoidance), and whether biases occur towards generally threatening or specific stimuli. The current study aimed to investigate the presence of all three types of biases in relation to both general-threat and health-related threat pictures in clinical participants with illness anxiety disorder as compared to participants with low levels of health anxiety. The results showed a larger difficulty in disengagement bias for health-related threatening stimuli than for general-threatening stimuli in all participants regardless of group factor. No other significant effects were identified. Thus, attention biases follow a simiar pattern in illness anxiety and low-anxiety participants.
