Factors leading to immersion in obsessions

Abstract

The inference-based approach (IBA) is a cognitive account of the etiology and maintenance of obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). According to the IBA, individuals with OCD confuse an imagined possibility with an actual probability, which leads them to become immersed in their obsessions. To investigate the relationship between OCD and the cognitive factors proposed to add to immersion, we used the Choice Blindness Paradigm (CBP). This paradigm is an experimental reasoning task designed to induce confabulatory reasoning. Undergraduate participants with high levels of OCD symptoms ( n = 29) were compared to those with low levels of OCD symptoms ( n = 32) with respect to their performance on the CBP. Compared to low-OCD participants, the results indicated that high-OCD participants were more certain (one aspect of immersion) when reasoning about falsely occurring events. However, the cognitive factors proposed by the IBA to underpin immersion did not mediate the relationship between OCD status and certainty regarding false events. Replication and refinement of the current study will help to determine the significance of these cognitive factors in obsessions.