Wong Shiu F, Williams Alishia D, Grisham Jessica R
School of Psychology, The University of New South Wales, Kensington, NSW, Australia.
Department of Clinical and Health Psychology, Utrecht University, Utrecht, The Netherlands.
J Behav Ther Exp Psychiatry. 2017 Dec;57:189-197. doi: 10.1016/j.jbtep.2017.06.002. Epub 2017 Jun 13.
Leading cognitive theories of OCD suggests that despite prevalent and persistent doubt, individuals with OCD do not have perceptual deficits. An alternate cognitive theory, the Seeking Proxies for Internal States hypothesis (SPIS), proposes that sensory distrust in OCD stems from actual deficits in accessing internal states. Consistent with the SPIS, previous research has found that high-OC individuals were less accurate than low-OC individuals in producing target levels of muscle tension in a biofeedback task and that OC symptoms were positively associated with reliance on an external proxy.
The current study aimed to replicate and extend the SPIS hypothesis in two experiments using a modified version of the biofeedback-aided muscle tensing task using grip strength as the sensory input and a distance perception task. We contrasted the performance of undergraduate students self-reporting high- and low-OC symptoms.
Overall, our findings failed to substantially support the SPIS hypothesis such that OC symptoms were not associated with deficient access to internal states of grip strength and distance perception or increased reliance on feedback.
As this study was conducted in a non-clinical sample, we were unable to generalise our findings to a clinical population.
Findings are commensurate with the wider OCD literature suggesting the absence of cognitive and perceptual deficits in OCD individuals.
强迫症的主流认知理论表明，尽管存在普遍且持续的怀疑，但强迫症患者并无感知缺陷。另一种认知理论，即内部状态寻求替代假说（SPIS），提出强迫症中的感觉不信任源于获取内部状态时的实际缺陷。与SPIS一致，先前的研究发现，在生物反馈任务中，高强迫症水平个体在产生目标水平的肌肉紧张度方面不如低强迫症水平个体准确，且强迫症状与对外部替代物的依赖呈正相关。
本研究旨在通过两个实验来复制并扩展SPIS假说，实验采用了改良版的生物反馈辅助肌肉紧张任务，以握力作为感觉输入，并进行距离感知任务。我们对比了自我报告有高、低强迫症状的本科生的表现。
总体而言，我们的研究结果未能充分支持SPIS假说，即强迫症状与获取握力和距离感知的内部状态不足或对反馈的依赖增加无关。
由于本研究是在非临床样本中进行的，我们无法将研究结果推广到临床人群。
研究结果与更广泛的强迫症文献一致，表明强迫症个体不存在认知和感知缺陷。
