Psychological Predictors of Health Anxiety in Response to the Zika Virus

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Abstract

The threat of a United States (U.S.) Zika virus pandemic during 2015–2016 was associated with public anxiety. Such threats represent opportunities to examine hypotheses about health anxiety. The present study investigated psychological predictors of Zika-related anxiety during the 2015–2016 outbreak. U.S. adults (N = 216) completed a battery of measures assessing Zika-related anxiety as well as psychological variables hypothesized to predict anxious responding to the threat of a domestic Zika outbreak. Contrary to hypotheses, regression analyses indicated that only contamination severity overestimates and greater Zika knowledge significantly predicted Zika-related anxiety. Study limitations and clinical implications are discussed.

Keywords

Health anxiety Contamination Zika 
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Notes

Compliance with Ethical Standards

Conflict of interest

Shannon M. Blakey and Jonathan S. Abramowitz declare that they have no conflict of interest.

Human and Animal Rights and Informed Consent

All procedures performed in studies involving human participants were in accordance with the ethical standards of the institutional and/or national research committee and with the 1964 Helsinki declaration and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards. Informed consent was obtained from all individual participants included in the study. This article does not contain any studies with animals performed by the authors.

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Copyright information

© Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2017

Authors and Affiliations

  1. 1.Department of Psychology and NeuroscienceThe University of North Carolina at Chapel HillChapel HillUSA

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