University of Surrey,Guildford,UK.
Newcastle University,UK.
Behav Cogn Psychother. 2014 Nov;42(6):682-92. doi: 10.1017/S1352465813000507. Epub 2013 Sep 27.
Recent work on cognitive-behavioural models of obsessive-compulsive disorder has focused on the roles played by various aspects of self-perception. In particular, moral self-ambivalence has been found to be associated with obsessive-compulsive phenomena.
In this study we used an experimental task to investigate whether artificially priming moral self-ambivalence would increase participants' deliberation on ethical problems, an index that might be analogous to obsessive-compulsive behaviour.
Non-clinical participants completed two online tasks designed to prime either moral self-ambivalence, general uncertainty, or neither. All participants then completed a task requiring them to consider solutions to moral dilemmas. We recorded the time participants took to respond to the dilemmas and the length of their responses; we then combined these variables to create a measure of deliberation.
Priming moral self-ambivalence led to increases in deliberation, but this was only significant among those participants who scored highly on a baseline measure of moral self-ambivalence. Priming general uncertainty had no significant effect upon deliberation.
The results suggest that moral self-ambivalence may play a role in the maintenance of obsessive-compulsive behaviour. We propose that individuals who are morally self-ambivalent might respond to situations in which this ambivalence is made salient by exhibiting behaviour with obsessive-compulsive characteristics. These findings have implications for the incorporation of ideas about self-concept into theories of obsessive-compulsive disorder.
最近关于强迫症的认知行为模型的研究工作集中在自我认知的各个方面所起的作用上。特别是，发现道德自我矛盾与强迫症现象有关。
在这项研究中，我们使用一项实验任务来研究人为地引发道德自我矛盾是否会增加参与者对伦理问题的思考，这可能类似于强迫症行为的一个指标。
非临床参与者完成了两个在线任务，旨在引发道德自我矛盾、一般不确定性或两者都不引发。所有参与者都完成了一项需要他们考虑解决道德困境的任务。我们记录了参与者回答困境所需的时间和他们回答的长度；然后，我们将这些变量结合起来，创建了一个用于衡量思考的指标。
引发道德自我矛盾导致思考增加，但只有在那些在道德自我矛盾的基线测量中得分较高的参与者中才具有统计学意义。引发一般不确定性对思考没有显著影响。
结果表明，道德自我矛盾可能在强迫症行为的维持中起作用。我们提出，道德上自我矛盾的人可能会通过表现出具有强迫症特征的行为来回应这种矛盾变得明显的情况。这些发现对将自我概念的概念纳入强迫症理论具有启示意义。
