Negative affectivity and intellectual ability: A study of their relation to self-reported physical symptoms, perceived daily stress and mood, and disciplinary problems in military recruits

Olav Vassend, Reidulf Watten, Trond Myhrer and Jon Lars Syvertsen

Social Science & Medicine, 1994, vol. 39, issue 4, 583-590

Abstract: In this study we examined the relationship between cognitive ability and Negative Affectivity (NA) (measured as cognitive and behavioral aspects of anxiety) on the one hand, and somatic complaints, symptom attribution (i.e. subjective evaluation of psychological vs somatic symptom causes), perceived daily stress/mood, and disciplinary problems on the other hand, in a sample of military recruits. As expected, cognitive and behavioral anxiety correlated with measures of somatic complaints and with perceived stress/negative mood in the daily service, as well as with symptom attribution. General ability correlated negatively with three of the five somatic complaint scales as well as with presence of disciplinary problems after controlling for NA. However, the effect of the ability factor on these dependent variables was very weak and difficult to interpret. On the whole, cognitive ability does not seem to be an interesting variable in research on the NA-somatic complaints relationship, at least as conceptualized on the trait level. Thus, cognitive ability appears to be of less importance as an explanatory in theories of symptom perception and symptom attribution.

Keywords: negative; affectivity; intellectual; ability; physical; symptoms; stress; mood; disciplinary; problems (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 1994
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0277-9536(94)90101-5
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:socmed:v:39:y:1994:i:4:p:583-590

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/supportfaq.cws_home/regional
http://www.elsevier. ... _01_ooc_1&version=01

Access Statistics for this article

Social Science & Medicine is currently edited by Ichiro (I.) Kawachi and S.V. (S.V.) Subramanian

More articles in Social Science & Medicine from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().