Abstract
Hypochondriac attitudes, somatic symptoms and negative affectivity.The present work examines the relationship between the negative affectivity, the somatic symptoms and the hypochondriac attitudes. Thirtythree subjects (18 women with a mean age of 30,27 years and 15 men with an average of 27,73 years) selected at random, between the clients of a center of conductors recognition, accepted voluntarily to compliment the following questionnaires: Whiteley Index (WI), Illness Attitudes Scale (IAE), Symptons Checklist (CMC), STAI-E-R and Depression Inventory of Beck (BDI). It was used the correlation coefficient of Pearson to estimate the correlations between the different variable of the study and was effected a Multiple Regression analysis to estimate the predictive capacity of the values in the CMC, STAI-R and BDI with respect to the two hypochondriac attitude measures (WI, IAE). The results indicate that the negative affectivity is associated to a greater self-report corporal nuisances level, to the propensity of overdoing the physiological alterations and to a trend to experience negative emotional states. However, the absence of relationship between negative emocional states and somatic nuisances and/or hypochondriac attitudes seems to indicate that the negative affectivity per se is not associated to somatic preoccupation. On the other hand, in the forecast of the somatic preoccupation, the negative affectivity has importance when is used a restricted hypochondria measure (WI), while when is used the IAE the corporal nuis nces have greater weight. In spite of the close found relationships, it does not remain clear in what measure and how the emotional states mediate in the establishment of the hypochondria.
