http://www.ehps2015.org/files/EHPS2015_Conference_Abstracts_27082015.pdf
29th Conference of the European Health Psychology Society
29th Conference of the European Health Psychology Society
Poster Presentation Abstracts
Health-threatening interpretation of ambiguity early on: risk or protective factor? Comparing CFS/ME and healthy individuals
I. Alexeeva , M. Martin 1
1 University of Oxford, United Kingdom
Background
A cognitive account of the persistence of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome/Myalgic Encephalomyelitis
(CFS/ME) proposes biased interpretation may distort symptom perception and undermine recovery.
Interpretation of somatic information that favours health-threatening meaning may lead to negative
and maladaptive illness cognitions and prolonged suffering.
The study aimed to measure an online
interpretive bias in CFS/ME, the interpretations made at the moment of encounter of ambiguous
information at an early stage of information processing.
Methods
33 CFS/ME and 33 healthy matched controls completed a lexical decision task that measured
preferences in the interpretation of ambiguity.
Findings
CFS/ME individuals did not have an interpretive bias towards health-threatening meaning following
presentation of ambiguous information F (6, 384) = .662, p = .680, ηp2 = .010.
Healthy participants
showed a bias towards Illness prime threat compared with the neutral primes, t (32) = 2.54, p = .016.
Discussion
The experiment showed an absence of interpretation biases in the early stages of information
processing among CFS/ME individuals, but suggested that healthy individuals may be susceptible to
the potentially threatening meaning of the ambiguous illness prime.