Individuals With OCD Lack Unrealistic Optimism Bias in Threat Estimation

Zetsche, Ulrike; Rief, Winfried; Exner, Cornelia

doi:10.1016/j.beth.2015.04.002

Cited by 15 publications

(18 citation statements)

References 25 publications

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“…Our findings indicating that this particularly takes place in the OCD-specific task in OCD participants may be interpreted that OCD participants perceive threat-relevant information in the contexts of OCD-specific implicit learning situations with more awareness, which in turn may result in a constant feeling of being threatened by OCD-related risks, an evocation of intrusive and obsessional thoughts and thereby to an overestimation of threat. This interpretation would also be in line with the finding obtained by Zetsche, Rief, and Exner ( 30 ), showing that impairments of OCD participants in the OCD-specific PCL task were associated with their biases in the prediction of checking-related events. In addition, our findings, consistent with previous results ( 18 ), suggest a deficit of OCD participants in learning cue–outcome associations in OCD-specific contexts, which might result in misjudgments of the incidence of OCD-related events and thereby to a further exacerbation of biases of overestimation of threat.…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 91%

“…Although the cover story of this task was created to raise contamination- and responsibility-related OCD fears being highly frequent in OCD, these emotional contents did not encompass all individually relevant fears of participants with OCD in our sample. Previous findings ( 18 , 30 , 31 ), which show an impairment of participants with OCD in this task being related to an inflexible strategy use and biases in the prediction of checking-related events, support the claim of an emotional valence of this paradigm for OCD participants. However, including a measure of state arousal in future studies would be important to determine the extent of produced fear in OCD participants when working on this OCD-specific PCL task.…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 78%

“…Results showed that participants with OCD performed as well as controls in the neutral task but scored significantly below healthy controls in the OCD-specific task. Using the same paradigm, two other studies found that the performance of OCD participants in the OCD-specific task was associated with biases in the prediction of checking-related events ( 30 ) and an inflexible strategy use ( 31 ). In healthy controls, arousal during encoding had a disruptive effect on implicit learning performance ( 32 , 33 ) and was related to a suboptimal strategy use ( 34 ) in PCL.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 98%

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The Neural Correlates of Probabilistic Classification Learning in Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder: A Pilot Study

et al. 2018

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Individuals suffering from obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) have been found to show deficits in implicitly learning probabilistic associations between events. Neuroimaging studies have associated these implicit learning deficits in OCD individuals with aberrant activation of the striatal system. Recent behavioral studies have highlighted that probabilistic classification learning (PCL) deficits in OCD individuals only occur in a disorder-specific context, while PCL remains intact in a neutral context. The neural correlates of implicit learning in an OCD-specific context, however, have not yet been investigated. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging during a neutral (prediction of weather) and an OCD-specific variant (prediction of a virus epidemic) of a PCL paradigm, we assessed brain activity associated with implicit learning processes in 10 participants with OCD and 10 matched healthy controls. Regions of interest (ROIs) were the striatum and the medial temporal lobe. ROI analyses revealed a significantly higher activity in the bilateral putamen and the left hippocampus of OCD participants as compared to healthy controls during both PCL tasks. The group differences could partly be subsumed under a group × task interaction effect with OCD participants showing a significantly higher activity than healthy controls in the left putamen and the left hippocampus in the OCD-specific task variant only. These results suggest a compensation of aberrant striatal activity by an augmented engagement of the explicit memory system particularly in a disorder-relevant context in OCD participants.

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Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 91%

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 78%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 98%

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The Neural Correlates of Probabilistic Classification Learning in Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder: A Pilot Study

et al. 2018

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“…These features significantly affect somatic health of a person and his or her subjective level of wellbeing. Therefore, considering the level of optimism and opportunity for its development might be important for a wide range of psychological problems (Lau, Kubiak, Burchert, Goering, Oberländer, von Mauschwitz, Hiemisch, 2014;Zetsche, Rief, & Exner, 2015;Hsu, Vincent, & Waszak, 2015;Volkova, 2013;Serlachius, Pulkki-Råback, Elovainio, Hintsanen, Mikkilä, Laitinen, Keltikangas-Järvinen, 2015).…”

Section: State Of the Problemmentioning

confidence: 99%

Optimism and Pessimism as a Source of Personal Potential Development

Чупина¹,

Gavrilenko²,

Tarasova³

2017

Proceedings of the Iii International Scientific and Practical Conference

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The prerequisite to the study was the increasing importance of the problem of optimism that has become popular and in-demand in the US and Russian psychology in recent decades that largely reflects real significance of the issue. In addition, carrying out an investigation on optimism and pessimism is necessary to solve a number of practical psychological problems faced by people of the modern society, particularly in psychological practice in coping with a wide range of psychological problems. Despite considerable interest towards the psychology of optimism in Western (mainly American) psychology and great practical significance of this field, it is neglected in Russian science. Therefore, it is necessary to ascertain the need for assimilation of achievements of Western psychology of optimism and development of Russian research in this direction.The aim of the research was studying and development of personal potential in optimists and pessimists by means of training on organisation. As the result of implementation of the training, it was found that there is no pronounced dynamics in the continuum of the pessimism-optimism against the background of qualitative changes in the studied parameters. Undoubtedly, the initiated research in this area requires a prolonged period of time.

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“…The authors concluded that people with OCD may lack an unrealistic optimism biasthe belief that one is less likely to experience harm or more likely to experience positive outcomes than are othersthat non-anxious individuals possess. More recent studies have likewise found the lack of an unrealistic optimism bias in other OCD samples (Zetsche et al, 2015). A study by Woods et al (2002) suggested that people with the disorder not only over-estimate the severity of negative events, but also under-estimate their ability to cope with such occurrences.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 98%

Affective forecasting accuracy in obsessive compulsive disorder

Hezel

Stewart

Riemann

et al. 2019

Behav. Cogn. Psychother.

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Background:Research indicates that people suffering from obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD) possess several cognitive biases, including a tendency to over-estimate threat and avoid risk. Studies have suggested that people with OCD not only over-estimate the severity of negative events, but also under-estimate their ability to cope with such occurrences. What is less clear is if they also miscalculate the extent to which they will be emotionally impacted by a given experience.Aims:The aim of the current study was twofold. First, we examined if people with OCD are especially poor at predicting their emotional responses to future events (i.e. affective forecasting). Second, we analysed the relationship between affective forecasting accuracy and risk assessment across a broad domain of behaviours.Method:Forty-one OCD, 42 non-anxious, and 40 socially anxious subjects completed an affective forecasting task and a self-report measure of risk-taking.Results:Findings revealed that affective forecasting accuracy did not differ among the groups. In addition, there was little evidence that affective forecasting errors are related to how people assess risk in a variety of situations.Conclusions:The results of our study suggest that affective forecasting is unlikely to contribute to the phenomenology of OCD or social anxiety disorder. However, that people over-estimate the hedonic impact of negative events might have interesting implications for the treatment of OCD and other disorders treated with exposure therapy.

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Individuals With OCD Lack Unrealistic Optimism Bias in Threat Estimation

Cited by 15 publications

References 25 publications

The Neural Correlates of Probabilistic Classification Learning in Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder: A Pilot Study

The Neural Correlates of Probabilistic Classification Learning in Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder: A Pilot Study

Optimism and Pessimism as a Source of Personal Potential Development

Affective forecasting accuracy in obsessive compulsive disorder

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