Elsevier

Behavior Therapy

Volume 48, Issue 5, September 2017, Pages 603-613
Behavior Therapy

To Do or Not to Do? Task Control Deficit in Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.beth.2017.01.004Get rights and content

Highlights

  • Stimuli can evoke the performance of a task that has a strong association with it

  • Task control is an executive mechanism aimed to suppress stimulus-driven behaviors

  • Impaired task control, evident in OCD patients, correlated with symptom severity

  • Response inhibition and interference control were not impaired in OCD patients

  • We suggest that reduced task control is associated with OCD symptoms

Abstract

Task control is an executive control mechanism that facilitates goal-directed task selection by suppressing irrelevant automatic “stimulus-driven” behaviors. In the current study, we test the hypothesis that less efficient task control in individuals diagnosed with obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) is associated with OCD symptoms, and specifically, with the inability to inhibit unwanted behaviors in OCD. Thirty-five healthy controls, 30 participants with OCD, and 26 participants with generalized anxiety disorder (GAD) completed the object-interference (OI) task to measure task control, the stop-signal task to measure response inhibition, and the arrow-flanker task to evaluate executive abilities not contingent upon task control. OCD patients, but not GAD patients or healthy controls, exhibited impaired performance on the OI task. The deficit in task control, but not in response inhibition, correlated with OCD symptom severity. We suggest that reduced task control may be one of the neurocognitive processes that underlie the inability to inhibit unwanted behaviors in OCD.

Section snippets

Setting

This study was conducted in a psychology department at an academic university. The study was reviewed and approved by the University Medical Center Institutional Research Board (IRB). After providing informed consent, participants underwent a clinical assessment, which included a clinical interview and self-report questionnaires, followed by the completion of three computerized tasks (in a counterbalanced order).

Participants

Ninety-one participants took part in the study: 30 individuals who met Diagnostic

Results

Demographics and clinical characteristics are presented in Table 1. There were no significant differences between the three groups in age, years of education, and proportion of females. The between-group differences for all clinical measures are shown in Table 1.

Discussion

This is the first study to investigate task control in OCD patients. In this sample, although the interaction between condition and group in the OI task was only marginally significant (see limitations below), our a priori planned comparisons found that OCD patients, but not GAD patients or healthy controls, exhibited significantly impaired performance on the OI task, consistent with deficient task control. Moreover, performance on the OI task was positively correlated with OCD symptom

Conclusions

OCD patients, but not healthy or GAD controls, displayed reduced task control—a control mechanism that is responsible for suppressing unwanted stimulus-driven behaviors. Efficiency of task control, but not of response inhibition, was found to correlate with OCD symptom severity. Therefore, we suggest that reduced task control, rather than a global executive or a general inhibitory deficit, may be one of the underlying processes for OCD patients’ inability to inhibit unwanted behaviors and may

Conflict of Interest Statement

HBS has received research funds from Transcept Pharmaceuticals (2011-2013), and royalties from Cambridge University Press and UpToDate, Inc. All authors declare no potential conflict of interest pertaining to the present manuscript.

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  • Cited by (0)

    We thank Prof. Reuven Dar and Amit Lazarov from Tel-Aviv University and Chen Aslan from Ben-Gurion University of the Negev for their assistance in collecting the data, and Mr. Omer Linkovski for his helpful insights. All authors declare no conflict of interest pertaining to the present manuscript. EK is supported by the Rothschild Foundation, the Molberger Scholar Award and The Israel Science Foundation (Grant No. 79/15).

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