Anxiety and selective attention in obsessive–compulsive disorder
Section snippets
Subjects
Seventeen individuals were recruited from the Anxiety and Stress Treatment Program at North Shore University Hospital. All of the participants met the DSM-IV (American Psychiatric Association, 1994) criteria for OCD, based on the Structured Clinical Interview for DSM-IV (SCID) (First, Spitzer, Gibbon, & Williams, 1995). They were also administered the Yale-Brown Obsessive Compulsive Scale (Y-BOCS) (Goodman, Price, Rasmussen, Mazure, Fleischmann, Hill et al., 1989). Individuals with severe
Reported levels of anxiety
As expected, controlling for baseline anxiety and for age, after reading the anxiety-provoking scenario, the OCD participants reported significantly higher subjective anxiety than did the controls (F(1, 33)=12.24, p<0.001). No group differences in reported anxiety were found at baseline or after the neutral scenario was presented (Table 1). The results supported the hypothesis that compared to controls, individuals with OCD report higher levels of anxiety when an anxiety-provoking cue is
Discussion
In order to evaluate the role that anxiety plays in selective attention, the performance of participants with OCD and controls was compared on cognitive tasks in a low level anxiety condition. Results showed that the OCD group performed slower than the control group on both the simple reading and the selective attention task, suggesting that OCD patients are likely to perform various cognitive tasks slower than individuals without OCD. This finding is consistent with Cox’s (1997) conclusion
Acknowledgements
We would like to thank Linda Reddy, Margaret Gibbs, Liat Ayalon, Ron Field, and Louis Hsu for their comments on earlier versions of the manuscript.
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