anxiety. Emotional suppression prob

anxiety. Emotional suppression probably results in a discrepancy between innerfeelings andouter expression and possible reactions of other people. Suppression is therefore probably positively related to the cognitive dimension of health anxiety as well. Whereas Gross and John [21] also found that individuals who habitually use suppression have less social support, people with hypochondriacal concerns tend to seek social support and medical reassurance [31]. For that reason, we expected a negative relationship between suppression and the behavioral dimension of health anxiety. In general, we expected positive relationships between maladaptive coping and emotion regulation strategies and dimensions of health anxiety (our detailed hypotheses are summarized in Fig. 1). Because various coping and emotion regulation strategies are strongly related to depression [8, 32] and also health anxiety shows substantial overlap with depression [33], significant associations between cognitive coping and emotion regulation strategies and health anxiety could also result from the shared variance with depression. However, we assumed that the hypothesized relations should not only result from this shared variance (i.e., significant correlations should be observable, even when statistically controlling for the levels of depression; Study 2). Study 1 was designed to test the outlined hypotheses regarding significant associations between maladaptive coping and emotion regulation strategies and health anxiety. Study 2 aimed at replicating and extending the findings of Study 1 by statistically controlling for individual differences in depressive symptoms and by testing a possible mediating influence of depressive symptoms.