| When individuals focus attention on themselves, some people may focus on one aspect of experience (e.g., bodily sensations) over another (e.g., emotions), and this difference between individuals may be an important predictor of various health outcomes (e.g., symptom-reporting). One assumption of previous research has been that these aspects of experience are polar opposites of the same dimension, and thus expression of emotions has been shown to have positive physical benefits. An alternative to this psychodynamically-oriented 'trade-off' model is that emotional experience and somatic experience are related orthogonally. Although much health psychology research has shown a relationship between emotions and the reporting of physical symptoms, the instruments used have often assumed an a priori relationship between the two and have not differentiated awareness of somatic sensations from symptom-reporting. The guiding hypothesis for the research presented here is that when exposed to stressful events, some people attend chiefly to their body and somatic sensations, but others focus more on the emotional aspects of the experience, and that attention directed to these two aspects is positively, not negatively related.; A series of studies was conducted to examine the utility of an attentional focus framework for understanding individual differences in somatic and affective reactions to stress. The first studies presented here established a scale with two internally consistent factors with good convergent and discriminant validity relative to other scales currently used in the field of health psychology. Subjects' scores on the two factors, somatic and affective, were positively correlated. Both factors accounted for significant variance in individual differences in somatic and affective response to physical and emotional stressors in the final study. Future studies are needed to explore the benefits of this trans-theoretical measure in understanding the relationship between emotions and health in a variety of populations. |
