Adolescents with inflammatory bowel disease: the roles of negative affectivity and hostility in subjective versus objective health.

Examination of how psychological factors relate to illness severity among adolescents with inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) is rare. Further, studies have not accounted for the pervasive influence of negative affectivity (NA) or distinguished among subjective, behavioral, and objective measures of IBD severity. We examined how NA, positive affectivity, expressed hostility, and negative life events were related to subjective (pain, fatigue, disability), behavioral (health care contacts), and objective (erythrocyte sedimentation rate) illness severity among 56 adolescents with IBD. NA was positively related to subjective illness, and expressed hostility was inversely related to objective illness. Other relationships were eliminated after controlling for NA. Data suggest that NA and subjective illness are comanifestations of a single disposition, but that expressed hostility has an independent relationship with disease activity among adolescents with IBD.