Effects of Dispositional Coping Strategy and Level of Health Anxiety on Attentional Bias

We examined the influence of dispositional coping strategy and level of health anxiety (HA) on attentional bias in regard to health-related stimuli. In a dot-probe task participants were exposed to health and nonhealth-related words for 1,250 ms. The high HA group showed significantly greater attentional bias in regard to health stimuli compared to the low HA group. In addition, in the low HA group there was no difference in attentional bias toward health-related words according to whether they were blunters (cognitively avoidant) or monitors (vigilant for information), but in the group with high HA blunters showed stronger attentional bias for health stimuli compared to monitors. Our results in this study confirmed that not only did individuals with HA show a bias toward selective attention to health-related information, but also that this bias was affected by their dispositional coping strategy.