Recalling symptom episodes affects reports of immediately-experienced symptoms: Inducing symptom suggestibility

Abstract

We report two experiments in which subjects were induced to over-report symptoms that they had been instructed to recall. In Experiment 1, subjects who recalled a past upset stomach episode rated themselves as presently experiencing higher levels of nausea and other gastric symptoms than did control subjects. Nonlinear variations in perceived symptom intensities were observed in subjects who participated in a distracter task after recalling the illness episode but before reporting their symptoms. In Experiment 2, subjects who recalled a symptom that is prototypic of flu (fever) reported experiencing more intense flu-related symptoms, whereas subjects who recalled having a sore throat reported additional strep-relevant symptoms. The suggestibility paradigm offers the first direct support for conditioned associations among symptoms belonging to the same illness category.

Key Words:

• Sympton reports
• sympton recall
• illness schema