Premium
Relationships between fear of COVID ‐19, cyberchondria, intolerance of uncertainty, and obsessional probabilistic inferences: A structural equation model
Author(s) -
Boysan Murat,
Eşkisu Mustafa,
Çam Zekeriya
Publication year - 2022
Publication title -
scandinavian journal of psychology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.743
H-Index - 72
eISSN - 1467-9450
pISSN - 0036-5564
DOI - 10.1111/sjop.12822
Subject(s) - psychology , structural equation modeling , covid-19 , probabilistic logic , social psychology , statistics , mathematics , medicine , disease , pathology , infectious disease (medical specialty)
The study was set out to explore the structural relationships between fear of COVID‐19, cyberchondria, intolerance of uncertainty, and obsessional probabilistic inferences. The data were recruited online from a community population ( n = 1,049) subjected to a confirmatory factor analytic procedure. The structural model specified according to the previous findings in the literature showed that a general tendency to negative expectations in terms of probabilistic thinking was significantly associated with both COVID‐19‐related‐fear and intolerance of uncertainty. Fear of COVID‐19 was significantly associated with cyberchondria. Probabilistic thinking style and intolerance of uncertainty contributed to cyberchondria through fear of COVID‐19 as well. We concluded that a tendency to engage in a probabilistic thinking style and intolerance of uncertainty seems to play role in the etiology of fear of infection and cyberchondria.