Obsessive Compulsive and Related Disorders
Jumping to Conclusions about Intrusive Thoughts: Relationships to Own Level of Obsessive-Compulsive Tendencies
Debbie M. Warman, Ph.D.
Professor
University of Indianapolis
Carmel, Indiana
Intrusive thoughts in OCD are negatively evaluated by people in the general population, most notably for sexual and violent thoughts, for which negative attitudes are prominent (e.g., Corcoran & Woody, 2008). Popular ways to assess attitudes towards individuals with intrusive thoughts are to present a vignette and determine social distance desired from the target (e.g., Warman et al., 2015), though other way to determine attitudes exist as well. A recent study investigated how much data people collect before making a decision about someone with various intrusive thoughts and found that people are more likely to jump to conclusions about a person with violent or sexual intrusive thoughts than they are about checking or contamination related thoughts (Warman, 2020). The present investigation examines the role one’s own obsessive-compulsive tendencies play in jumping to conclusions. Participants (N = 84), recruited from an undergraduate research pool (see full study, Warman, 2020), were asked to read a number of vignettes about people (a person with sexual, a person with violent, a person with checking related, and a person with contamination related intrusive thoughts) and draw stimuli before making a conclusion about the person in the vignette. Participants also completed the OCI-R (Foa et al., 2002), a popular measure of OC symptomology. Participants were classified based on their OCI-R score as low in OC tendencies (their score was at the 25% or lower for the sample, score of 8 or lower, n = 21) or high in OC tendencies (their score was at the 75% or higher for the sample, score of 25 or higher, n = 21). A Mixed Model ANOVA was conducted with type of thought as the within subjects variable and OC tendencies classification (high or low) as the between subjects variable. Results indicated a significant effect for type of thought, F (3, 120) = 4.78, p = .004, η2 = .11. Participants drew the same number of stimuli for the targets with violent and pedophilia thoughts and the same number for the targets with checking and contamination thoughts, but drew fewer stimuli for the targets with violent and pedophilia intrusive thoughts than they did for the checking and contamination thoughts (with the exception of having a statistically similar number of stimuli for the violent and checking targets). No type of thought x OC classification interaction, F (3, 120) = 1.34, p</em> = .265, η2 = .032. Results indicated a significant between subjects effect for OC classification, F(1, 40) = 9.99, p = .003, such that high OC participants requested significantly fewer stimuli before making a decision about the targets than did low OC participants, t(40) -= 3.16, p = .003. Results will be discussed in terms of cognitive theories of intrusive thoughts.