Health anxiety by proxy in parents and dog owners: Same construct, different phenomenology.
Description
Health anxiety by proxy refers to excessive concerns or preoccupation that a loved one may be suffering from or may acquire a serious illness. Although research on parents suggests that this newly emerging condition may be highly prevalent, assessment has been limited in terms of attachment figures other than children. Dogs take the role of children in many families and research has shown that the attachment between humans and dogs shares important characteristics with the child-parent attachment. Thus, in the current study, for the first time, we aim to investigate whether health anxiety by proxy may also be present in dog owners that do not have children. To this end, we adapted an existing measure of health anxiety by proxy for parents to the situation of dog owners and used the existing parent and adapted dog owner’ questionnaires to gather data from parents and dog owners. Overall, we found comparable distributions of health anxiety by proxy in both subsamples and high internal consistencies for both scales. Interestingly, dog owners reported higher levels of health anxiety by proxy as well as higher levels of depression than parents. In both samples, health anxiety by proxy was linked to other forms of psychopathology. However, these associations were found to be stronger in parents than in dog owners. Moreover, while health anxiety by proxy and attachment towards children were negatively associated in parents, we found the opposite association in dog owners (i.e., a positive association between health anxiety by proxy and attachment towards dogs). Taken together, these findings provide first evidence for the existence of health anxiety by proxy in dog owners, while suggesting that the phenomenology of the condition may differ between parents and dog owners.