The Body and Emotions study is an additional questionnaire among adult Lifelines participants. The study consists of a questionnaire, followed by a web-based version of the Affective Picture Paradigm task. This additional assessment was initiated by researchers from the University Medical Center Groningen, and aims to study the influence of psychological factors on somatic symptom proneness.

The collected BAEQ data is currently under embargo. Please contact the Lifelines data managers at data@lifelines.nl for more information.

The first phase of this study consisted of a questionnaire, which was sent out to 3.6k adolescent and 112.7k adult participants in March/April of 2025. Response was 8% for adolescents (0.3k), and 26% among adults (29.2k).

Adult participants who completed the questionnaire of phase 1 of this study, were asked at the end of the questionnaire whether they were willing to participate in the second phase of this study, which consisted of a computer task. Approximately 12k participants indicated that they wanted to take part in this second phase, of whom approximately 3k participants completed the computer task in June/July of 2025.

The BAEQ questionnaire contained the following instruments:

• Questions on alexithymia
• The Body Consciousness Questionnaire
• The emBODY tool

The computer task consists of the Affective Picture Paradigm. In this task, participants look at a variety of pictures (neutral or emotionally loaded), and the experience of somatic symptoms is assessed before and after viewing the pictures by means of symptom questionnaires.