Obsessional states: anxiety disorders or schizotypes? An information processing and personality assessment

Abstract

SynopsisThis paper presents evidence that on an information processing task, designed to investigate putative inhibitory mechanisms in selective attention, obsessive compulsive disordered individuals can be clearly distinguished from other anxiety disorder clients and show significantly higher scores on questionnaire measures designed to detect schizotypy in the normal population. It is suggested that these results provide some support for the idea that obsessive compulsive disorder may be misclassified as an anxiety disorder and may in fact be categorically more closely aligned to the schizophrenic constellation of disorders.