Unique affective and cognitive processes in contamination appraisals: Implications for contamination fear
Research highlights
▶ Individual differences in disgust propensity predicted greater contamination appraisals of objects that have been directly contaminated. Individual differences in the ability to disengage attention from disgust cues predicted greater contamination appraisals of objects with only distal and indirect contact with the initial contaminant. These results suggest that affective and cognitive mechanisms may play unique, but complimentary, roles in mediating contamination fear.
Section snippets
Participants
108 non-clinical participants (85 females) were recruited from undergraduate courses. Mean age was 19.3 (SD = 1.2) and 85% were Caucasian. This initial study with a non-clinical sample will provide justification for future research with clinical samples.
Spatial cueing task
The spatial cueing task presents two empty boxes on the right and left of a central fixation cross. A cue (i.e., stimulus picture) is displayed in one of the boxes for either 100 or 500 ms. The cue then disappears and either a ‘/’ or ‘X’ probe is
RT data preparation
RT data were cleaned by first removing errors, then removing RTs that were 2.5 standard deviations or more above the individual's mean or less than 200 ms (e.g., Fox et al., 2001, Koster et al., 2006). Three participants’ RT data were removed from analyses due to excessively elevated mean RTs (i.e., greater than 3 SDs above sample mean). The number of RT data removed was low (i.e., on average, analyses were run on 95% of participant's RT data).
Descriptive statistics
Table 1 presents descriptive data on the study
Discussion
Results of the present study suggested that DP and delayed disengagement from disgust at 500 ms explained unique aspects of the chain of contagion task. Higher DP predicted elevated initial contamination appraisals (i.e., the intercept), but also predicted a greater decline in appraisals across the pencils (i.e., the linear slope) that occurred at a faster rate (i.e., the quadratic slope). By contrast, delayed disengagement from disgust cues at 500 ms only predicted sustained elevations across
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2012, Journal of Anxiety DisordersCitation Excerpt :Procedural modification of the treatment of some anxiety disorders is informed by recent psychopathology research is the function that that the emotion of disgust exercises in some specific phobias and in contamination-related OCD (Olaltunji & McKay, 2009). Moreover, experimental psychopathology research has shown that disgust is a more refractory emotion than fear when applying exposure and response prevention procedures (Cisler et al., 2011; Olatunji, Forsyth, & Cherian, 2007). It follows that treatments for disgust and fear-mediated disorders may differ for the modification of these emotions (Adams, Badour, Lohr, & Feldner, in press; Meunier & Tolin, 2009).
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