The role of temperament in somatic complaints among young female adults

Kellner's Symptom Questionnaire, a Highly Sensitive Patient-Reported Outcome Measure: Systematic Review of Clinimetric Properties

INTRODUCTION

Patient-reported outcomes (PROs) are of increasing importance in clinical medicine. However, their evaluation by classic psychometric methods carries considerable limitations. The clinimetric approach provides a viable framework for their assessment.

OBJECTIVE

The aim of this paper was to provide a systematic review of clinimetric properties of the Symptom Questionnaire (SQ), a simple, self-rated instrument for the assessment of psychological symptoms (depression, anxiety, hostility, and somatization) and well-being (contentment, relaxation, friendliness, and physical well-being).

METHODS

The PRISMA guidelines were used. Electronic databases were searched from inception up to March 2019. Only original research articles, published in English, reporting data about the clinimetric properties of the SQ, were included.

RESULTS

A total of 284 studies was selected. The SQ has been used in populations of adults, adolescents, and older individuals. The scale significantly discriminated between subgroups of subjects in both clinical and nonclinical settings, and differentiated medical and psychiatric patients from healthy controls. In longitudinal studies and in controlled pharmacological and psychotherapy trials, it was highly sensitive to symptoms and well-being changes and discriminated between the effects of psychotropic drugs and placebo.

CONCLUSIONS

The SQ is a highly sensitive clinimetric index. It may yield clinical information that similar scales would fail to provide and has a unique position among the PROs that are available. Its use in clinical trials is strongly recommended.

Association between psychosomatic health symptoms and common mental illness in Ghanaian adolescents: Age and gender as potential moderators

Little is known about the role of age and gender in the association between psychosomatic symptoms and common mental illness in Ghanaian adolescents. This cross-sectional study examined age and gender as moderators between psychosomatic symptoms and common mental illness using data from a school-based survey ( N = 770). Males reported higher psychosomatic symptoms and common mental illness, while younger adolescents reported higher common mental illness only. Psychosomatic symptoms were positively associated with common mental illness, but age and gender did not moderate this association. Interventions aimed at reducing the prevalence rate in psychosomatic symptoms are crucial in decreasing common mental illness in Ghanaian adolescents.

Affective science perspectives on cancer control: strategically crafting a mutually beneficial research agenda

Cancer control research involves the conduct of basic and applied behavioral and social sciences to reduce cancer incidence, morbidity, and mortality and improve quality of life. Given the importance of behavior in cancer control, fundamental research is necessary to identify psychological mechanisms underlying cancer risk, prevention, and management behaviors. Cancer prevention, diagnosis, and treatment are often emotionally laden. As such, affective science research to elucidate questions related to the basic phenomenological nature of emotion, stress, and mood is necessary to understand how cancer control can be hindered or facilitated by emotional experiences. To date, the intersection of basic affective science research and cancer control remains largely unexplored. The goal of this article is to outline key questions in the cancer control research domain that provide an ecologically valid context for new affective science discoveries. We also provide examples of ways in which basic affective discoveries could inform future cancer prevention and control research. These examples are not meant to be exhaustive or prescriptive but instead are offered to generate creative thought about the promise of a cancer research context for answering basic affective science questions. Together, these examples provide a compelling argument for fostering collaborations between affective and cancer control scientists.

Anxiety symptomatology and perceived health in African American adults: moderating role of emotion regulation

Although emotional health has been theoretically and empirically linked to physical health, the anxiety-physical health association in particular is not well understood for African American adults. This study examined anxiety as a specific correlate of perceived health in addition to testing the potential moderating role of emotion regulation, an index of how and when individuals modulate emotions, in the association for anxiety to perceived health. Study participants were 151 community-based African American adults who completed measures of anxiety symptomatology and emotion regulation in addition to responding to a self-report question of perceived health. Results showed that higher levels of anxiety symptomatology were associated with poorer health ratings for those who reported more limited access to emotion regulation strategies but not those who reported having more emotion regulation strategies. The findings suggest that anxiety-related distress and health problems may be interrelated when emotion regulation strategies are limited. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2014 APA, all rights reserved).

Somatic symptoms in those with performance and interaction anxiety

This study (n = 304) examined the relationship between somatic symptoms and social anxiety. Significant differences in the experience of somatic symptoms were found among four groups (i.e. performance anxious, interaction anxious, generalized socially anxious, and controls). Post hoc analyses revealed that those who exceeded the clinical cutoff for generalized social anxiety exhibited more somatic symptoms than those who exceeded the clinical cutoff in the other two social anxiety domains or controls. Individuals in each group exhibited more somatic symptoms than controls, but subtypes did not differ in the amount of somatic symptoms experienced. Additionally, regression analyses revealed that type of somatic symptoms experienced varied depending on subtype.

Daily physical complaints and hippocampal function: an fMRI study of pain modulation by anxiety

Pain is a popular physical complaint in human. It is known that experimental anxiety modulates pain processing through hippocampal amplification, whereas it is not known whether a similar experimental reaction is related to daily physical complaints known as 'somatization'. The purpose of this study is to investigate the neural correlates of pain modulation induced by anxiety, particularly in the hippocampus, and how individual differences in this neural reaction relate to somatization. We measured neural response to noxious electrical stimulations, as well as the response to the preceding visual anticipatory cues (which induced low anxiety or high anxiety), by functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Individual daily physical symptoms were assessed by using the somatization subscale of the Symptom Checklist 90 revised (SCL-90-R). Correlation coefficients between the neural activations and the somatization scores were calculated. We found that manifestation of daily physical symptoms was related to smaller differences in hippocampus activation between high and low anxiety states, suggesting that the ability of the hippocampus to distinguish anxiety states was weakened by the chronic condition that caused the daily physical symptoms. The proper inhibition of neural activation in low anxiety states in the hippocampus and the anterior insula was observed to occur in companionship with lower daily physical complaints. These findings indicate that anxiety's alteration of the network that includes the hippocampus and that is associated with pain modulation underlies the manifestation of somatization.