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Objective

Symptom perception in pathological illness anxiety (PIA) might be biased so that somatic signals are overreported. In the somatic signal detection task (SSDT), performance in detecting weak tactile stimuli gives information on overreporting or underreporting of stimuli. This task has not yet been applied in PIA.

Methods

Participants with PIA (n= 44) and healthy controls (n= 40) underwent two versions of the SSDT in randomized order. In the original version, tactile and auxiliary light-emitting diode (LED) stimuli were each presented in half of the trials. In the adapted version, illness or neutral words were presented alongside tactile stimuli. Participants also conducted a heartbeat mental tracking task.

Results

We found significantly higher sensitivity and a more liberal response bias in LED versus no-LED trials, but no significant differences between word types. An interaction effect showed a more pronounced …