The transdiagnostic nature of disgust propensity: An examination of its associations with anxiety and obsessive compulsive-related disorder symptoms

Abstract

Significant research highlights the role of disgust propensity in obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) and other anxiety-based diagnoses and suggests that heightened disgust propensity may be a transdiagnostic risk factor for these disorders. However, OCD was reclassified from an anxiety to an obsessive-compulsive and related disorder (OCRD), due in part to OCD being associated with a range of non-anxiety affective experiences, including disgust. A fair amount of work has examined the relationship between disgust, OCD, and anxiety disorders; less information is available on its relation to the OCRDs. The present study examined associations between specific domains of disgust propensity and self-reported symptoms of several anxiety disorders, OCD, body dysmorphic disorder (BDD), and hoarding in two non-clinical samples. Results showed that specific phobia, OCD, and BDD symptoms were consistently and strongly correlated with disgust domains. Results of multivariate regression analyses indicated replicable relationships between animal-reminder disgust and specific phobia symptoms, core disgust and animal phobia symptoms, and contamination disgust and cleaning symptoms, controlling for negative affect, anxiety sensitivity, and experiential avoidance. Results were inconsistent for panic, BDD, and hoarding symptoms. These results partially support the argument that the OCRDs are more distinct than similar and that OCD and some anxiety disorders are defined by common psychological processes.