Assistant professor University of Groningen Groningen, Groningen, Netherlands
Individuals with anxiety disorders have been shown to infer danger on the basis of their anxiety responses: 'if I feel anxious, there must be danger.' This tendency logically hampers the identification of false alarms and may thus act in a way to confirm the a priori threat value of feared stimuli/situations. Since disgust is assumed to play a critical role in OCD, the question rose whether individuals suffering from fear of contamination perhaps similarly infer danger on the basis of their disgust response: 'If I feel disgusted, it must be contagious.' In line with this, earlier research found evidence that high contamination fearful individuals inferred risk of becoming ill on the basis of experienced disgust (Verwoerd et al., 2013). In two subsequent studies we tested (i) the robustness of these earlier findings using a similar scenario-based approach in high vs. low contamination fearful participants, (ii) the domain and response specificity of emotional reasoning in contamination fears, and (iii) whether the findings extend to a clinical sample of treatment seeking individuals with OCD. Study 1 included participants with varying levels of contamination fear (N = 130). Results showed converging evidence indicating that high contamination fearful individuals infer heightened contamination-relevant threat on the basis of “experienced” disgust. In addition, there was tentative evidence that this emotional reasoning bias was restricted to disgust responses in contamination-relevant contexts, suggesting that the emotional reasoning bias was domain and response specific. Study 2 included individuals with OCD who applied for treatment (N = 59) and a comparison group without OCD (N = 51). Findings showed that individuals with OCD showed heightened emotional reasoning that was especially pronounced for disgust-based reasoning. Together, the findings support the view that contamination fearful individuals rely on (imagined) disgust experiences when judging the threat value of contamination relevant situations. This finding might not only help explain the persistence of contamination fears, but also provides some fresh clues to improve currently available treatment options.