Application of a worry reduction intervention in a medically unexplained symptoms-analogue student-sample

Objective: Worry is an important perpetuating factor of Medically Unexplained Symptoms (MUS). Former research has shown that a worry postponement instruction is effective in reducing Subjective Health Complaints (SHC) in non-clinical samples. This study aimed to (1) replicate these findings in a MUS-analogue student-sample and (2) assess alexithymia as a moderator.

Design: The current study had an experimental design with two waves of data collection: pre- and post-intervention.

Main outcome measures: A MUS-analogue student-sample consisting of 114 undergraduate students with high self-reported health worry and a minimum of two doctor visits in the previous year with no current diagnosis for a (chronic or acute) disease were instructed to register their worry frequency and duration eight times per day via an experience sampling-application on their smartphones. The intervention group additionally postponed their worries to a 30-minute period in the evening. SHC were assessed pre- and post-intervention.

Results: The intervention did not have an effect on worry or SHC. Alexithymia did not moderate this effect (p’s > .05).

Conclusion: Our study did not find evidence for the effectiveness of the worry reduction intervention on SHC in a MUS-analogue student-sample. This finding contributes to several previous studies that have found mixed evidence for the effectiveness of the worry reduction intervention on SHC and suggests that the worry intervention may not be effective in all cases.     

Science: Introductory paper

This paper sets out to examine which abilities, values and behaviors should be encouraged in the young, in the light of the accelerating development in the fields of scientific and technical knowledge.     

Adaptive family functioning and emotion regulation capacities as predictors of college students' appraisals and emotion valence following conflict with their parents

This study examined whether the relationship between college students' adaptive family functioning and the valence of emotions following recent conflict with their parents is mediated by both distal constructs (psychological coping resources and mood regulation expectancies) and the more proximal construct of cognitive appraisals about the desirability or undesirability of the conflict experience. Participants were 609 undergraduate students enrolled in a large, US southwestern university. The results of applying proposed mediational models to these data, developed for both paternal and maternal conflict, suggested theoretically meaningful associations between the antecedent construct of adaptive family functioning, mediating variables of coping resources, mood regulation expectancies, and cognitive appraisals, and the outcome variable of emotional valence. The results of this study may be useful in identifying psychological resources and patterns of thinking about stressful events that affect emotional reactions.