Feeling of doing in obsessive–compulsive checking

Abstract

a b s t r a c tResearch on self-agency emphasizes the importance of a comparing mechanism, which scans for a match between anticipated and actual outcomes, in the subjective experience of doing.This study explored the ''feeling of doing" in individuals with checking symptoms by examining the mechanism involved in the experienced agency for outcomes that matched expectations. This mechanism was explored using a task in which the subliminal priming of potential action-effects (emulating outcome anticipation) generally enhances people's feeling of causing these effects when they occur, due to the unconscious perception of a match between primed and observed outcomes. The main result revealed a negative relationship between checking and self-agency for observed outcomes that were primed prior to actions. This suggests that checking individuals fail to grasp the correspondence between actual outcomes of their actions and expected ones. We discuss the possible role of undermined self-agency in checking phenomena and its relationship with cognitive dysfunction.

Looking for Outcomes: The Experience of Control and Sense of Agency in Obsessive-compulsive Behaviors

“…Consistently, the results of two studies [50,57] that investigated the sense of control in persons with OCD symptoms can be interpreted along the same lines. Participants with OCD symptoms (regardless of OCD subtype) may be characterized by an increased illusory sense of control in compulsive-like situations (i.e., when their actions are directed towards effortful attempts to control an event [50]).…”

“…Participants with OCD symptoms (regardless of OCD subtype) may be characterized by an increased illusory sense of control in compulsive-like situations (i.e., when their actions are directed towards effortful attempts to control an event [50]). However, only individuals with checking proneness appeared to experience an undermined sense of control in routine-like situations (i.e., when their actions are supposed to be automatically controlled, rather than under conscious monitoring [57]). This latter result is consistent with the van der Weiden et al [63] study in which people with a low level of agency were also found to be less prone to experience the illusion in the Wheel of Fortune task.…”

“…The authors suggested that these results reflect situations in which people have an intention to generate a specific outcome but lose track of this intention in the course of action because they did not keep a high-level representation as they monitored the action at a lower level; consequently, they may lack experience of control and agency for the intended outcomes they have yet produced. Overall, a chronic low-level of agency [54] and related undermined sense of agency [57] in individuals with checking symptoms could explain the repeated enactment of routine actions regardless of the obvious achievement of the goal.…”

“…In a later study, Belayachi and Van der Linden [57] specifically examined the mechanism that may be involved in the "naturally occurring" feeling of control over outcomes that match expectations, in non-clinical participants with OCD symptoms. The study was based on the assumption that an unconscious comparing mechanism that grasps a correspondence between expected and actual outcomes underlies the subjective experience of control (in effortless situations).…”

Experiences of Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder

“…Activity episodes in this data set tend to relate to OCD subtypes in the literature that have overt compulsions, such as checking to prevent danger and mistakes (e.g. Belayachi & Van der Linden, 2010), symmetry (e.g. Rasmussen & Eisen, 1992) and feelings of 'having to' perform an action until it 'feels right' without perceiving any benefit in performing that particular action (Coles, Frost, Heimberg, & Rheaume, 2003).…”