British journal of health psychology
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Br J Health Psychol · May 2003
Experimental evidence for interpretive but not attention biases towards somatic information in patients with chronic fatigue syndrome.
This study tested whether CFS patients have an attentional information processing bias for illness-related information and a tendency to interpret ambiguous information in a somatic fashion. ⋯ CFS patients have an interpretive bias for somatic information which may play a part in the maintenance of the disorder by heightening patients' experience of physical symptoms and helping to maintain their negative illness schemas. Although patients did not show an attentional bias in this study, this may be related to the methodology employed.