Sibylle Petersen

KU Leuven | ku leuven · Research unit for Health Psychology

Idiopathic environmental intolerance refers to a group of poorly understood health conditions characterized by heterogeneous somatic symptoms that occur in response to environmental triggers, but for which no physiological causes can be found. We focus on three varieties, namely symptoms attributed to (a) chemical substances, (b) electromagnetic fi...

This article contributes to a broader understanding of how the branding of places affects both residents and tourists. While branding often relies on simplified messages, the effectiveness of such strategies for complex brands remains questionable. Residents in particular possess a confounded knowledge of the place and could disagree with simplifie...

The relationship between the conscious experience of physical symptoms and indicators of objective physiological dysfunction is highly variable and depends on characteristics of the person, the context and their interaction. This relationship often breaks down entirely in the case of “medically unexplained” or functional somatic symptoms, violating...

Psychological factors have been shown to influence course and treatment of COPD, but little is known about the impact of social factors. Subjectively experienced loneliness has been demonstrated to predict morbidity in various chronic diseases, but its impact on COPD remains poorly understood. Furthermore, the associations of loneliness with diseas...

The transition dyspnea index (TDI) is widely used to measure changes in subjectively perceived dyspnea over time in COPD patients. The original interview version assesses the impact of daily activities on dyspnea in the subdomains of functional impairment, magnitude of task, and magnitude of effort, which are further condensed into a summary score....

Background: The transition dyspnea index (TDI) is one of the most widely used instruments in patients with COPD to measure changes in subjectively perceived dyspnea over time. In its original version it is used as guideline for a structured interview to assess the impact of daily activities on dyspnea in the three subdomains of functional impairmen...

Autonomous system models of interoception describe perception of bodily sensations as an active process in which the brain generates and tests hypotheses about the body on the basis of proximal information. This view of perception as inference allows a new perspective on the role of affect in perception. Affect and interoception are closely linked,...

Patients with Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD) suffer from chronic dyspnea, which is commonly perceived as highly aversive and threatening. Moreover, COPD is often accompanied by disease-specific fears and avoidance of physical activity. However, little is known about structural brain changes in COPD patients and respective relations wi...

Anxiety and anxiety sensitivity are positively related to accuracy in the perception of bodily sensations. At the same time, research consistently reports that these traits are positively related to bias, resulting in the report of more and more intense symptoms that poorly correspond with physiological dysfunction. The aim of this study was to tes...

Older age is associated with a decline in physical fitness and reduced efficiency of the respiratory system. Paradoxically, it is also related to reduced report of dyspnea, that is, the experience of difficult and uncomfortable breathing. Reduced symptom reporting contributes to misdiagnosis or late diagnosis of underlying disease, suboptimal treat...

Research from social and environmental psychology has shown that identification by residents with a place leads to numerous desirable outcomes like increased commitment and residential satisfaction. Thus, in the competition for residents, cities focus on building a favorable identity of a place to increase identification with the place. However, li...

Adequate perception of bodily sensations is essential to protect health. However, misinterpretation of signals from within the body is common and can be fatal, for example, in asthma or cardiovascular disease. We suggest that placing interoceptive stimuli into interoceptive categories (e.g., the category of symptoms vs. the category of benign sensa...

Where is the best place to live? The answer depends on how we ask the question and which scale we apply. Our study offers two contributions to the increasing comparability of research on citizen satisfaction: First, it combines together 18 different scales with items derived from qualitative research and then reduces those items to a set of 21 ques...

Objective: Anxiety and panic are associated with the experience of a range of bodily symptoms, in particular unpleasant breathing sensations (dyspnea). Respiratory theories of panic disorder have focused on disturbances in blood gas regulation, but respiratory muscle tension as a source of dyspnea has not been considered. We therefore examined the...

  Comorbid anxiety is highly prevalent in Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD), and it is related to increased morbidity and mortality. It has consistently been found that social comparison has substantial impact on mood. However, despite the strong social component of pulmonary rehabilitation, the effect of social comparison processes on a...

Self-reported asthma symptoms correlate only modestly with measures of underlying pathophysiological mechanisms. In this study, we investigated the role of fear of symptoms and perceived control on respiratory symptom perception in patients with asthma. Patients with intermittent to moderate persistent asthma (N=32) were administered 4 subsequent r...

Gating models of sensory perception suggest that increased attention towards the self leads to more on-line processing of sensory information and less report bias. However, little is known about the interaction of self-awareness with fearful beliefs about bodily sensations. In the present study, we explored report bias of breathing-related sensatio...

Background: A relationship between symptom attitudes and negative affect has consistently been found in a range of different symptom domains. Little is known, however, about the role of different aspects of the self-concept in this relationship. We explored the mediating role of interferences of symptoms with the self-concept in the association of...

Several models have been proposed to conceptualize psychological representations of health, illness, and bodily sensations. These models differ as to the cognitive and affective components they include, whether they study the interaction of these components, and whether associations between psychological representations of bodily states and affecti...

The affective dimension of illness representation plays an important role in asthma self-management. However, little is known about the stability of this affective representation across contexts. We explored the role of social comparison in this affective evaluation. Participants included 20 individuals reporting an asthma diagnosis and 33 healthy...

It has been shown that general negative affect can distort self report of symptoms. Little is known, however, about the relationship of specific symptom-qualities with specific emotional states such as anxious and depressive mood. Possible distinct biological links between these mood states and dysregulation of ventilation have been suggested. The...

Dyspnea is defined as an uncomfortable awareness of the need to breathe. Verbal report of dyspnea can be a valuable source of diagnostic information. However, little is known about the cognitive representation of respiratory sensations and about their affective evaluation in individuals not suffering from respiratory disease. Such knowledge would b...

Recent research suggests that dyspnea is not a single sensation but a multidimensional construct reflected in different verbal descriptors that can provide useful diagnostic information. In this study superordinated clusters of dyspnea were investigated in combination with a dimensional approach. We examined the use of 20 respiratory symptom descri...

Verbal descriptors of dyspnea are important in understanding the underlying mechanisms, but little is known about the language of dyspnea in COPD. We examined the language of dyspnea in COPD at different intensity levels of dyspnea. Verbal descriptors of dyspnea were assessed in 64 patients with moderate-to-severe COPD (mean age, 62 years; mean per...

Verbal descriptors of dyspnea have been suggested as being useful in providing information on the underlying pathophysiology. However, little is known about the reliability of these descriptors. The present study examined the reliability of a German language list of respiratory symptom descriptors and studied the association of these descriptors wi...