Stove checking behaviour in people with OCD vs. anxious controls.

Area of Science:

• Cognitive psychology
• Clinical psychology
• Neuroscience

Background:

• Repetitive actions can impair memory and confidence in task completion.
• This phenomenon is relevant to understanding compulsive behaviors in obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD).
• Existing research often uses non-clinical samples and virtual stimuli, with limited data on actual threat attention in OCD.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate memory confidence, responsibility, and attention to threat in individuals with OCD during a real-world task.
• To examine the relationship between checking behavior, perceived harm, and memory in OCD and anxiety disorder groups.

Main Methods:

• Participants with OCD (n=30) and an anxious control (AC) group (n=18) completed memory and responsibility measures.
• A stove-checking task was performed in a functional kitchen using portable eye-tracking technology.
• Pre- and post-task ratings of harm, responsibility, memory, and certainty were collected.

Main Results:

• The OCD group reported greater trait and state responsibility for harm but similar memory confidence compared to the AC group.
• Longer checking duration in the OCD group predicted higher harm ratings, consistent with the AC group.
• Individuals with OCD showed less visual attention to threat items; however, in the AC group, greater stove attention correlated with increased harm ratings and decreased certainty/memory.

Conclusions:

• Compulsive actions in OCD are influenced by multiple factors, suggesting potential circumvention of self-perpetuating checking mechanisms.
• Future research should identify factors influencing the activation of these self-perpetuating mechanisms in OCD.