Couples with neurotic partner conflicts were investigated by the Giessen-Test. Men were compared against women, and a clinical sample against a "normal" population sample. Neurotic men and women tend to idealize extremely symbiotic-like openness, high dominance and autonomy, concerning the own person as well as the partner. So they aspire to character attributes rather giving rise to problems i...

An estimated 15–30% of all primary care consul­ tations are for medically unexplained symptoms (Kirmayer et al, 2004). Patients with such symptoms receive large amounts of symptomatic investigation and treatment (Barsky & Borus, 1999). The number of medically unexplained symptoms over a per­ son’s lifetime correlates linearly with the number of depressive and anxiety disorders experi enced (Kat...

Medically unexplained symptoms such as headache, tiredness and stomach problems are common amongst children and research highlights the potential importance of the family environment in their development and maintenance. The present qualitative study aimed to explore how mothers make sense and manage their child's unexplained recurrent somatic symptoms. Mothers (n = 13) with children with heada...

The ground-breaking manuscript on chemical sensitivity symptoms by Kreutzer et al. (1) brings some long overdue rigor to the epidemiology of what has come to be called multiple chemical sensitivity (MCS). It also provides an opportunity to highlight work important to public health in an overlooked field, that of medically unexplained somatic symptoms. MCS along with other syndromes associated w...

As trait emotional intelligence [TEI] is claimed to facilitate adaptation, study 1 (N= 80) investigated whether TEI would be associated with adaptative outcomes such as enhanced self-reported mental and physical health. As these assumptions were supported, study 2 (N= 75) tested the hypothesis of a moderating effect of TEI on the relationship between stress and psychological and somatic health....

Chair: Stuart Montgomery, Barbara van Zwieten-Boot somatic symptoms that are characteristic for generalised anxiety. The largely nonspecific autonomic anxiety symptoms have been reduced in importance in DSMIV (AmeriCommittee: J. Angst, D.S. Baldwin, M. Bourin, R. Buller, can Psychiatric Association, 1994) with more weight given D. Hackett, S. Kasper, U. Kern, M. Lader, Y. Lecrubier, to nervous ...

This paper examines: (1) the impact of having a child with a disability on parents' mental and physical health among urban-dwelling African Americans and (2) the extent to which positive and negative social interactions with family other than the spouse moderate the impact of child's disability on parental adaptation. Analyses are based on a probability sample of African Americans living in Mil...

OBJECTIVE To provide some general recommendations for psychiatric assessment of depression among Chinese patients within a predominately Western society. METHOD A literature review is provided with interpretive comments. RESULTS The prevalence of depression reported in community studies undertaken in Chinese communities is very low. To what extent Chinese people experience and seek help for...

BACKGROUND Therapeutic intervention programs for somatic symptom disorder (SSD) show only small-to-moderate effect sizes. These effects are partly explained by the motivational problems of SSD patients. Hence, fostering treatment motivation could increase treatment success. One central aspect in SSD patients might be damage to motivation because of symptomatic relapses. Consequently, the aim of...

Evidence suggests that interoceptive and exteroceptive attention might have different perceptual effects. However, the effects of these different types of body-focused attention have never been directly compared. The current research investigated how interoceptive and exteroceptive attention affect subsequent performance on the somatic signal detection task (SSDT). In Experiment 1, 37 participa...