Oren Ela, Friedmann Naama, Dar Reuven
School of Psychological Sciences, Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv, Israel.
Language and Brain Lab, School of Education and Sagol School of Neuroscience, Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv, Israel.
Conscious Cogn. 2016 May;42:125-134. doi: 10.1016/j.concog.2016.03.012. Epub 2016 Mar 19.
The study examined the prediction that obsessive-compulsive tendencies are related to an attenuated sense of agency (SoA). As most explicit agency judgments are likely to reflect also motivation for and expectation of control, we examined agency in sentence production. Reduced agency can be expressed linguistically by omitting the agent or by using grammatical framings that detach the event from the entity that caused it. We examined the use of agentic language of participants with high vs. low scores on a measure of obsessive-compulsive (OC) symptoms, using structured linguistic tasks in which sentences are elicited in a conversation-like setting. As predicted, high OC individuals produced significantly more non-agentic sentences than low OC individuals, using various linguistic strategies. The results suggest that OC tendencies are related to attenuated SoA. We discuss the implications of these findings for explicating the SoA in OCD and the potential contribution of language analysis for understanding psychopathology.
该研究检验了强迫症倾向与减弱的能动感（SoA）相关这一预测。由于大多数明确的能动判断可能也反映了控制的动机和期望，我们在句子生成过程中考察了能动感。能动感的降低可以通过省略施事者或使用将事件与引发该事件的实体相分离的语法结构来在语言上得以体现。我们使用结构化语言任务，在类似对话的情境中引出句子，考察了在强迫症（OC）症状测量中得分高与得分低的参与者对施事性语言的使用情况。正如预测的那样，高OC个体比低OC个体使用各种语言策略生成的非施事性句子显著更多。结果表明，OC倾向与减弱的SoA相关。我们讨论了这些发现对于阐释强迫症中的SoA的意义以及语言分析对理解精神病理学的潜在贡献。
