2001 Volume 41 Issue 7 Pages 539-547
Somatosensory amplification refers to the tendency to experience somatic sensation as intense, noxious, and disturbing. It includes an individual's disposition to focus on unpleasant sensations and to consider them as pathological rather than normal. Barsky and his colleagues have reported that the concept of somatosensory amplification is helpful in understanding a variety of clinical conditions characterized by bodily complaints disproportionate to demonstrable medical disease. To examine the reliability and validity of the Japanese Version of Somatosensory Amplification Scale(SSAS), patients attending the psychosomatic medicine clinic and internal medicine clinic were recruited for the study in the university setting. Participants were 48 psychosomatic outpatients(psychosomatic group)and 33 outpatients with general medical problems(control group). All subjects completed four questionnaires : SSAS, Profile of Mood States(POMS), Medical Symptom Checklist, and Self-rated Stress Perception Scale. The SSAS had 10 items to ask the respondent a range of uncomfortable bodily sensations on an ordinal scale from 1 to 5. The POMS consisted of six mood state scales of tension-anxiety, depression, angerhostility, vigor, fatigue, and confusion. The Medical Symptom Checklist was used to assess 16 common somatic symptoms, i.e.headache, visual symptoms, dizziness, ringing in the ears, nausea/vomiting, diarrhea, constipation, abdominal pain, muscle pain, joint pain, back pain, chest pain, palpitation, shortness of breath, insomnia, and fatigue. The Self-rated Stress Perception Scale was to assess degrees of perceived stress to psychosocial situations. In the total sample, the SSAS had item-to-scale correlation of 0.27 to 0.84(all p<0.05)with adequate internal consistency(Cronbach's alpha=0.79). Also, the SSAS scores were positively correlated with the total number of somatic symptoms, degrees of perceived psychosocial stress, and the POMS tension-anxiety, depression, fatigue and confusion scale scores(all p<0.05) ; they were negatively correlated with the POMS vigor scale scores(p<0.0005). The SSAS scores were higher in the psychosomatic group than in the comparison group(p<0.005), and differentiated the psychosomatic group from the comparison group by the multiple logistic regression analysis(p<0.05), controlling for the effects of age(p<0.005), sex, total number of somatic symptoms, degrees of perceived psychosocial stress, and all the POMS scores. It was suggested that the SSAS may be a clinically useful tool to evaluate Japanese psychosomatic patients in terms of experiencing, reporting, and functioning in medical conditions.
