Recent research on mental contamination (internal, psychological feelings of dirtiness) has focused primarily on examining the experimental variables necessary to provoke contamination-related thoughts, feelings and behaviour; yet, relatively little is known regarding the individual differences among participants' mental contamination responses to these situational and experimental characteristics. The purpose of this study was to determine whether variables associated with symptoms, beliefs and appraisals could predict the experience of mental contamination after an established provocation. Female undergraduate students (n = 70 from Part I of this study; Elliott & Radomsky, 2009), completed a series of questionnaires then listened to an audio recording and imagined that they were receiving a forced, non-consensual kiss from a man described as moral or immoral. Participants indicated the presence and degree of mental contamination and appraisals of the man and act, then completed a behavioural task for which spontaneous washing was recorded. Results indicated that, although symptoms of physical contamination were able to predict feelings of mental contamination, appraisal variables emerged as unique predictors of feelings of mental contamination. Results are discussed in terms of cognitive-behavioural conceptualizations of and treatments for contamination fears.
The fear of contamination is thought to be comprised of two separate but related fears: those pertaining to physical and mental contamination. Previous research on mental contamination involved studies in which more than one independent variable was manipulated simultaneously. In particular, an immoral act (e.g., a non-consensual kiss) had been coupled with an immoral man (e.g., the person who forces the kiss) in each manipulation. The purpose of this study was to separate manipulations of the immorality of the man from the immorality of the act. Female undergraduate students (n=148) listened to an audio recording and imagined that they were experiencing either sharing a consensual kiss with a man described as moral or immoral, or receiving a forced, non-consensual kiss from a man described as moral or immoral. Participants indicated the presence and degree of mental contamination and then completed a behavioural task for which spontaneous washing was recorded. Results indicated that a non-consensual kiss evoked greater feelings of mental contamination than a consensual kiss. In particular, participants who imagined a non-consensual kiss from a man described as either moral or immoral reported the greatest feelings of mental contamination, whereas participants who imagined a consensual kiss from a man described as moral reported the least. Results are discussed in terms of cognitive-behavioural conceptualizations of and treatments for contamination fears.
In order to test the proposition that imagining carrying out an unacceptable non-consensual act can evoke contamination-related feelings in the perpetrator, 4 connected experiments were carried out involving male students. The effects of the experimental procedure were enhanced by the introduction of a theme of betrayal which boosted the feelings of contamination and urges to wash. The non-consensual scenarios were followed by substantial increases in negative emotions, notably shame, disgust and guilt, and these increases were boosted over successive enhancements of the procedure. Overall the results show that perpetrators of (imagined) unacceptable acts report a range of negative emotions and feelings of dirtiness. The main conclusion of this research is that imagining an unacceptable, non-consensual act can produce feelings of contamination. It is an experimental illustration of mental contamination, that is, contamination which is evoked by a mental event without any contact with a tangible contaminant.
There is confusion about the status of excessive hoarding. In particular, there is an unresolved question about whether or not it is a manifestation of obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). There are some definite similarities between 'compulsive' hoarding and OCD, but they are outweighed by the differences between them. It is proposed that the matter can be clarified by separating hoarding from OCD, and that this would advance clinical work and research.
People with schizophrenia are impaired at organizing potentially ambiguous visual information into well-formed shape and object representations. This perceptual organization (PO) impairment has not been found in other psychiatric disorders. However, recent data on body dysmorphic disorder (BDD), suggest that BDD may also be characterized by reduced PO. Similarities between these groups could have implications for understanding the RDoC dimension of visual perception in psychopathology, and for modeling symptom formation across these two conditions. We compared patients with SCZ (n=24) to those with BDD (n=20), as well as control groups of obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) patients (n=20) and healthy controls (n=20), on two measures of PO that have been reliably associated with schizophrenia-related performance impairment. On both the contour integration and Ebbinghaus illusion tests, only the SCZ group demonstrated abnormal performance relative to controls; the BDD group performed similarly to the OCD and CON groups. In addition, on both tasks, the SCZ group performed more abnormally than the BDD group. Overall, these data suggest that PO reductions observed in SCZ are not present in BDD. Visual processing impairments in BDD may arise instead from other perceptual disturbances or attentional biases related to emotional factors.
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