OBJECTIVE To study differences between working and sick-listed chronic repetitive strain injury (RSI) patients in the Netherlands with respect to indices of quality of life and illness perception. METHODS In a cross-sectional design, one questionnaire was sent to all 3,250 members of the national RSI patient association. For descriptive purposes, demographics, work status and complaint-relate...

Perceptions are inherently probabilistic; and can be potentially manipulated to induce illusory experience by the presentation of ambiguous or improbable evidence under selective (spatio-temporal) constraints. Accordingly, perception of the McGurk effect, by which individuals misperceive specific incongruent visual and auditory vocal cues, rests upon effective probabilistic inference. Here, we ...

The Illness Perception Questionnaire (IPQ) is a new method for assessing cognitive representations of illness. The IPQ is a theoretically derived measure comprising five scales that provides information about the five components that have been found to underlie the cognitive representation of illness. The five scales assess identity the symptoms the patient associates with the illness, cause pe...

BACKGROUND The Common Sense Model (CSM) of illness representations was used in the current study to examine the relative contribution of illness perceptions and coping strategies in explaining adjustment to inflammatory bowel disease (IBD). METHODS Participants were 80 adults consecutively attending an outpatients' clinic with a diagnosis of either Crohn's disease or ulcerative colitis. Respo...

Women with breast cancer respond to the illness and its medical management in their own personal way. Their coping behavior and self-management are determined by their views (cognitions) and feelings (emotions) about symptoms and illness: their illness perceptions. This paper reports the results of a systematic literature review of illness perceptions and breast cancer. In the 12 studies identi...

PURPOSE Cancer survivors construct perceptions of illness as a (mal)adaptive mechanism. These perceptions motivate/drive subsequent self-management behaviors toward symptoms and treatment that influence health outcomes. Negative illness perceptions have been associated with increased mortality in other chronically ill groups. However, this association is under-researched in cancer survivors. We...

Background: Adjustment to chronic disease is a complex and multidimensional construct which can help the patients deal with profound changes in their personal life resulting from illness. Ulcerative Colitis (UC) with unpredictable and disabling course, among chronic diseases, can be challenging and little is known about the role of psychological adjustment of the patients toward it. The aims of...