School of Psychological Sciences, Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv 69978, Israel.
Psychol Med. 2022 Oct;52(13):2404-2412. doi: 10.1017/S0033291722001908. Epub 2022 Jul 18.
People with obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) tend to distrust their memory, perception, and other cognitive functions, and many OCD symptoms can be traced to diminished confidence in one's cognitive processes. For example, poor confidence in recall accuracy can cause doubt about one's memory and motivate repeated checking. At the same time, people with OCD also display performance deficits in a variety of cognitive tasks, so their reduced confidence must be evaluated in relation to their actual performance. To that end, we conducted an exhaustive review and meta-analysis of studies in which OCD participants and non-clinical control participants performed cognitive tasks and reported their confidence in their performance. Our search resulted in 19 studies that met criteria for inclusion in the quantitative analysis, with all studies addressing either memory or perception. We found that both performance and reported confidence were lower in OCD than in control participants. Importantly, however, confidence was more impaired than performance in participants with OCD. These findings suggest that people with OCD are less confident in their memory and perception than they should be, indicating a genuine in this population. We discuss potential mechanisms that might account for this finding and suggest avenues for further research into under-confidence and related meta-cognitive characteristics of OCD.
强迫症（OCD）患者往往对自己的记忆、感知和其他认知功能不信任，许多 OCD 症状可以追溯到对自己认知过程的信心不足。例如，对回忆准确性的信心不足会导致对自己记忆的怀疑，并促使反复检查。同时，强迫症患者在各种认知任务中也表现出表现缺陷，因此必须根据他们的实际表现来评估他们信心的降低。为此，我们对强迫症患者和非临床对照组参与者执行认知任务并报告对其表现的信心的研究进行了详尽的回顾和荟萃分析。我们的搜索结果导致了 19 项符合纳入定量分析标准的研究，所有研究都涉及记忆或感知。我们发现 OCD 患者的表现和报告的信心都低于对照组。然而，重要的是，强迫症患者的信心比表现受损更严重。这些发现表明，强迫症患者对自己的记忆和感知的信心低于应有的水平，这表明该人群存在真正的信心不足。我们讨论了可能解释这一发现的潜在机制，并提出了进一步研究强迫症患者信心不足和相关元认知特征的途径。
