Health Anxiety, Hypochondriasis, and the Anxiety Disorders
Section snippets
Participants
Participants were 157 adults (i.e., ≥ 18 years old) with a primary (principal) diagnosis of HC or an anxiety disorder (diagnostic and assessment procedures are described below) who were seeking evaluation and treatment. Forty-nine patients had a principal diagnosis of PD, followed by 32 with social phobia, 21 with GAD, 18 with OCD, and 16 with specific phobia. Twenty-one patients had HC. Many had additional Axis I diagnoses (42.0%), including 26 (16.64%) with depressive disorders. The mean age
Reliability and Item-Level Analyses
The mean SHAI total score for the patient sample was 36.6 (SD = 13.2, range = 3–68). SHAI total scores were not significantly associated with age (r = .06, p > .10) or gender, t(155) = –1.61, p > .10. The SHAI demonstrated excellent internal consistency (α = .96). Each of the 18 items evidenced acceptable corrected item-total correlations (range = .61 to .87) based on the criterion of .30 recommended by Nunnally and Bernstein (1994).
Confirmatory Factor Analysis of the SHAI
Using AMOS 5.0 (Arbuckle, 2003), we conducted a confirmatory factor analysis
Discussion
Clinical observations suggest that health anxiety is present in a variety of psychological disorders, yet very little empirical research on health anxiety exists in the literature. One reason for this dearth of research is that very few measures have been developed to assess the construct of health anxiety. The SHAI is a novel instrument that assesses the cognitive and behavioral features of health anxiety. It possesses good psychometric properties among individuals with HC and among
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