Illness schema activation and attentional bias to coping procedures

Relatively little research to date has directly addressed the schematic nature of illness representations proposed by H. Leventhal, J. Weinman, and L. A. Phillips' (1980) common sense model of illness. The present experiments tested the hypothesis that coping information is schematically encoded within the representations of a specific illness.

A 2 (primed vs. control) x 2 (past user of coping strategy vs. nonuser of coping strategy) design was used in 2 experiments with independent samples. A subliminal prime was used to activate a common cold schema outside of conscious awareness.

Response latencies in milliseconds for correct responses to a target common cold remedy word on a grammatical decision task served as the dependent measure in each experiment. Target words were Lemsip in Experiment 1 and lozenge in Experiment 2.

In each experiment, a significant interaction of Prime x Past Strategy Use was obtained. Participants in whom the "common cold" schema was activated and who also reported high past strategy use demonstrated attentional bias to the name of a popular common cold remedy.

Activation of a schematic representation of illness may automatically activate information related to coping procedures encoded in memory with the illness.