Attentional bias on threating stimuli in patients with obsessive-compulsive disorder

Abstract

Attentional bias towards threat may be a key factor associated with development and maintaining symptoms of obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). Through the study of attentional bias feature in OCD would be helpful to understand the obsessive-compulsive symptoms and development.We use emotion Stroop task, dot-probe task and eye-tracking methodology in measure attentional bias of obsessive-compulsive disorder, found that OCD patients may performance attentional bias to the general threat stimulus and obsessive-compulsive symptoms related stimulus, and OCD patients may have attentional bias to those obsessive-compulsive symptoms related stimulus in specialty.At present, difficult to repeat studies and inconsistent results are the main problems, and the differences in experimental materials and samples may be the important factors that lead to those inconsistency results. Key words: Obsessive-compulsive disorder; Attentional bias; Stroop; Threating stimuli; Eye-tracking methodology