Cognitive Bias to Symptom and Obsessive Belief Threat Cues in Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder

Abstract

The current study examined the extent to which patients with obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD) demonstrate cognitive biases to OCD symptom or inflated responsibility threat cues. Participants with either primary contamination-washing or doubting/harming-checking OCD, non-OCD anxiety disorders, and student controls completed a primed lexical decision task. Following either neutral or OCD-threat priming conditions, participants made lexical decisions regarding different sets of word stimuli: nonwords, OCD symptoms, OCD inflated responsibility, and depression. Following the OCD primes, the primary contamination-washing symptom subgroup showed increased interference on OCD symptom words compared with the harming symptom and student groups. The primary contamination-washing subgroup also showed increased interference on responsibility words compared with the harming, non-OCD anxious and student groups. However, subsidiary analyses comparing patients with contamination obsessions with and without associated fears of harming others through the spreading of contaminants, demonstrated that it was the latter group that evidenced cognitive biases to responsibility threat cues. These results are considered in relation to cognitive models of OCD.