Abstract

Cognitive processes are considered to be relevant to the etiology and maintenance of somatoform disorders. The goal of this study was to investigate the attentional biases, the memory biases and the cognitive characteristics in the somatization group. For this purpose, we administered several self-report tests, the modified Stroop task, and the incidental memory task to 17 patients with somatization and 18 normal control group. The major results and the implications of this study were as followings. The somatization group showed the significant Stroop interference effects for somatic-symptom words and more accurately recognized the somatic-symptom words than the other words. These results suggested that the somatization group have cognitive biases for somatic-symptom words. Also the somatization group significantly less recalled positive words than did the normal group. Besides, the somatization group revealed the cognitive functioning difficulty. Finally, the limitations of this study and the directions of future study were discussed. (Korean J Str Res 2010;18:69∼79)

• Keywords: Somatization, Modified stroop task, Attentional biases, Memory biases, Cognitive characteristics;