Feared self and responsibility in obsessive compulsive phenomena

This study investigated the roles of feared self and inflated responsibility in obsessive-compulsive tendencies through an online experiment.

A total of 185 participants (M_age = 28.11, SD = 9.12) were randomly assigned to either a heightened responsibility or control condition, then primed with feared self scenarios (morality or culpability) or neutral control scenarios presented through vignettes.

Participants completed a neutral baseline vignette. They were then randomly assigned to responsibility conditions (heightened vs. low) and priming conditions (morality feared-self, culpable feared-self or neutral control) involving vignette tasks with embedded spelling and grammatical errors for participants to identify. Responsibility was manipulated via instructional framing emphasizing the clinical importance of responses, and participants were allowed to review their responses, providing a behavioural measure of checking. Discomfort ratings (0-100 scale) and response times were recorded as outcome measures.

The responsibility manipulation did not lead to significant variance in outcome variables, while participants' existing level of feared self and the feared-self manipulation were linked to a significant increase in average levels of discomfort.

These findings provide experimental evidence that feared-self plays a fundamental cognitive-affective role in obsessive-compulsive tendencies. This underscores the importance of integrating feared-self processes into cognitive models to better understand discomfort-related responses in obsessive-compulsive phenomena.