Contents of It's not All in Your Head by Asmundson and Taylor

The cognitive symptoms of health anxiety comprise various mistaken beliefs
called, cognitive distortions (Taylor & Asmundson, 2004; see Table 1). Individuals with
health anxiety experience disease conviction (i.e., the belief they are physically ill),
hypervigilance to bodily sensations and changes, and recurrent thoughts about serious
disease. These misinterpretations are maintained by selective attention in that people with
health anxiety may have a memory bias for pain words, a bias towards social and illness
threats, and a tendency to misinterpret health information (Hadjistavropoulos,
Hadjistavropoulos, & Quine, 2000; Owens, Asmundson, Hadjistavropoulos, & Owens,
2004). They also tend to have negative estimates of health outcomes and expect to be at
higher risk for medical complications (Avia & Ruiz, 2005). Individuals with health
anxiety may have increased somatosensory amplification (i.e., a tendency to focus
attention on bodily sensations and misinterpret those sensations; Bleichhardt, Timmer, &
Rief, 2005). Therefore, health anxiety has a pervasive impact on many areas of a person‘s
cognitive functioning.
The primary somatic feature of health anxiety is the tendency to overestimate the
seriousness of bodily sensations, fluctuations, and symptoms of general medical
conditions (Taylor & Asmundson, 2004; see Table 1). As a result, these symptoms are
not attributed to common causes such as age, changes in diet, overwork, or fatigue
(Barsky et al., 1988) and people with health anxiety become preoccupied with the
meaning general health symptoms (Taylor & Asmundson, 2004). People with
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