Abstract

It was hypothesized that fearful experiences of obsessive-compulsives might be associated with their cognitive characteristics. This study was designed to identify whether there is the tendency of selective information processing of threat stimuli in obsessive-compulsives or not. The subjects in this study were obsessive students. In order to manipulate stressful experiences they were shown the aversive or neutral scenes according to the treatment conditions. Immediately afterwards, a modified Stroop task was administered. Subsequently, through word recognition test hit and the degree of confidence of each recognition decision were examined. The results were as follows. As expected, the amount of color naming interference on threat words was larger than on neutral words in the obsessive group; the difference between the two contents of words did not appear in the control group. However, the stressful experiences induced by the aversive scenes had not any effect on the amount of color naming interference. Furthermore, the obsessive group showed superior performance to the control group in the word recognition test, and both groups recognized better threat words than neutrals. In the confidence rating of each recognition decision, on the other hand, only the main effect of word contents was significant, but any other effects were not. In the post-hoc analysis, the signal detection analysis of recognition decisions was executed. As the result, the difference between the two groups was significant in neither d` nor beta. These results were interpreted as confirming the hypothesis that there is the tendency of selective information processing of threat stimuli in obsessive-compulsives. And these facts supported the clinical reports that obsessive-compulsives did not get control of processing related to threat stimuli. Finally, this tendency of selective information processing in obsessive-compulsives was discussed in terms of both attentional bias toward threat stimuli and danger schema. In addition, the implications of this study, the limitations of this, and the direction of further research were discussed.