Emotional Intelligence and Sociotropy-Autonomy in Hypochondriasis.
Research type
Research Study
Full title
Emotional Intelligence and Sociotropy-Autonomy in Hypochondriasis (Severe Health Anxiety). Study 1: Emotional Intelligence, and Sociotropy-Autonomy in hypochondriacal patients. A comparison to a matched student sample. Study 2: How do hypochondriacal patients experience and make sense of emotional material? A qualitative study using Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis.
IRAS ID
127127
Contact name
Karol G Papis
Contact email
Sponsor organisation
University of Wolverhampton
Research summary
Hypochondriasis (i.e., health anxiety) is a prevalent and costly condition. Clinical theorising and empirical research has clearly stated that almost any mental disorder is linked to emotional problems. Bearing in mind the absence of a unified conceptual model of hypochondriasis, the current study is first to examine in-detail the emotional intelligence (EI) in hypochondriasis, and will provide new insights into emotional skills and deficits in this clinical group.
Study 1 will use self-report (trait EI) and ability EI measures, and a sociotropy-autonomy measure to enable a comparison (by inspection) of how the clinical sample performed in relation to the student comparison sample. Based on previous literature, it is expected that the clinical sample will be characterised by lower trait emotional intelligence, below-the-average performance on the sub-categories of the ability emotional intelligence (perceiving emotions, facilitating thought, understanding emotions and managing emotions), and by higher sociotropy scores, while their autonomy scores are expected to be either lower or not different from the comparison group.
In study 2, the 4 clinical participants will undergo an interview that will investigate how the patients understand and manage emotional material, thus enabling a confrontation of clinical observations with the psychometric outcomes from Study 1. The interview will be transcribed and analysed using Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA). It will be one of relatively few thus far that focus on exploration of subjective accounts of this particular clinical group.
The current study could lend support for the re-classification of hypochondriasis from somatoform category to anxiety disorders group in DSM-V. It could also provide important information about the role other people play in the disorder (sociotropy), and how autonomous the hypochondriacal patients consider themselves to be. The findings could have implications for the approach to diagnosis and treatment of the condition, by detailing specific emotional deficits in hypochondriacal individuals.
REC name
West Midlands - Solihull Research Ethics Committee
REC reference
13/WM/0219
Date of REC Opinion
26 Jul 2013
REC opinion
Further Information Favourable Opinion