Truth meets the eye!! Eye-tracking method sheds new light on mechanics of hypochondriasis.
World Journal of Psychiatry has reported in a recent study that illness-related information processing biases appear to be a robust feature of Illness anxiety disorder (IAD)-commonly called as hypochondriasis and may have an important role in explaining the etiology and maintenance of the disorder.
IAD is a common, distressing, and debilitating condition, with the key feature being a persistent conviction of the possibility of having one or more serious or progressive physical disorders. It has been argued that the dysfunctional beliefs about illness and misinterpretation of bodily symptoms appear to be specific and important for patients with IAD and to be a highly specific characteristic of IAD.
Because eye movements are guided by visual-spatial attention, eye-tracking technology is a comparatively direct, continuous measure of attention direction and speed when stimuli are oriented. Researchers have tried to identify selective visual attention biases by tracking eye movements within dot-probe paradigms because dot-probe paradigm can distinguish these attentional biases more clearly.
The study was designed to record eye movements of individuals with IAD and healthy controls while participants viewed a set of pictures from four categories (illness-related, socially threatening, positive, and neutral images). Biases in initial orienting were assessed from the location of the initial shift in gaze, and biases in the maintenance of attention were assessed from the duration of gaze that was initially fixated on the picture per image category.
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