Department of Clinical and Health Psychology, Utrecht University, Utrecht, The Netherlands.
Memory. 2013;21(4):417-22. doi: 10.1080/09658211.2012.727006. Epub 2012 Sep 27.
Individuals with obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) exhibit perseverative behaviours, like checking, to reduce uncertainty, but perseveration paradoxically enhances uncertainty. It is unclear what mechanism might be responsible. We hypothesised that perseverative OC-like behaviour produces "semantic satiation" and interferes with the accessibility of meaning. Healthy participants repeated 20 types of OC-like checking behaviour nonperseveratively (2 times) or perseveratively (20 times). Afterwards, they decided as quickly as possible whether a picture was semantically related to the checked object. The nonperseverative condition showed spreading of activation: Judgements were faster for related than for unrelated objects and pictures. The effect was blocked in the perseverative condition, where reaction times for related and unrelated items were similar. The results suggest that the ironic effects of compulsive perseveration are due to interference with spreading of activation.
强迫症（OCD）患者表现出坚持行为，如检查，以减少不确定性，但坚持反而会增加不确定性。目前尚不清楚是什么机制导致了这种情况。我们假设坚持 OCD 样行为会产生“语义饱和”，并干扰意义的可及性。健康参与者非坚持地（2 次）或坚持地（20 次）重复 20 种 OCD 样检查行为。之后，他们尽快决定图片与检查对象是否在语义上相关。非坚持条件下表现出激活扩散：与无关对象相比，相关对象的判断更快。该效应在坚持条件下被阻断，其中相关和无关项目的反应时间相似。结果表明，强迫坚持的讽刺效果是由于对激活扩散的干扰。
