Exploring the Effect of Emotional Images and Words on Somatic Distress

Despite the prevalence of persistent somatic symptoms both in clinical and healthy human population, these challenges are often stigmatized and ignored due to lack of organic pathology. Despite growing interest in this field, earlier studies had revealed many significant methodological shortcomings. Earlier Studies in this field mainly used affective pictures to induce different affective states and thereby trigger different bodily symptoms among subjects. This study aims to employ two different stimulus types of namely words and pictures for inducing affective states among subjects. Thus, we aim to evaluate whether the ASP effect (tendency to report more symptoms after negative stimuli) also occurs if the affective words are used compared to the traditional method of picture. Furthermore; as a part of explanatory analysis, we are interested to explore the effect of different moderate variables such as alexithymia and baseline somatic symptom distress and trait negative affectivity on this robust effect.