Case Study: The Health Anxiety Inventory

levels of anxiety or depression. The currently used cut-off score of eight gives a specificity of 0.78 and a sensitivity of 0.90 for anxiety sub-scale, and a specificity of 0.79 and a sensitivity 0.83 for depression sub-scale (Bjelland et al., 2002). In the present study, Cronbach’s alpha was 0.86 for depression and 0.84 for anxiety. The Health Anxiety Inventory (HAI) is 18-item questionnaire measuring clinical and non-clinical health anxiety. Each item is scored from 0 to 3. The first fourteen items forms the man measurement and the last four items forms the negative consequences measurement that assesses respondents’ perceived negative consequences of being ill. A Cronbach’s alpha of 0.89 indicates a high level of internal consistency (Salkovskis et al., 2002). In the present study, Cronbach’s alpha was 0.87.
Images were categorized into three groups: pain-related, neutral, and ambiguous. Examples were included in Appendix (see Figure 1 – 3). Pain-related images clearly depict people with injuries or experiencing pain (e.g., a man holding his leg in pain, with a facial expression of pain; a woman holding his shoulder, with a facial expression of pain). Neutral images feature people without visible injuries or pain in everyday situations (e.g., a man sitting at a desk working; a man playing cricket). Ambiguous images picture people in uncommon situations or positions (e.g., a man lying on the ground, with no facial expression of pain; two men supporting a woman, with no facial expression of pain), which may or may not have injurious or painful causes. Ten ambiguous images were first collected using the google search engine. Then each ambiguous image was matched to one neutral image and one pain-related image on number of people present in the scene, both foreground and background. No significant difference on number of people present was found among three image groups (F(2, 27) = .11, p = .901, p2 =