Characteristics of Emotional Information Processing in Patients with Chronic Obsessive Compulsive Disorder: Comparison with Schizophrenia and Healthy Controls

Seok, Jeong Ho; Kim, Jae Jin; Jeon, Jong Hee; Lee, Hong Shick; An, Suk Kyoon; Lee, Eun; Kim, Chan Hyung

Abstract

OBJECTIVES
Obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD) tends to take chronic course as schizophrenia. Researchers reported that OC patients had idiosyncratic sensitivity to threat-related information, while schizophrenic patients were reported to have affective blunting. We hypothesized that there might be a difference in emotional response between OCD and SPR in cronic phase.
METHODS
Eight different emotional tasks were done by 25 healthy controls, 21 OCD patients and 25 SPR patients. Visual stimuli were made by pairing two words or pictures. Four kinds of emotional stimuli(positive, negative, combined and neutral) were presented to subjects through monitor and they were asked to report their subjective feelings by pushing mouse button. In the combined condition, a pair of positive words (or pictures) and negative words (or pictures) were presented simultaneously. The responses and response time were recorded and analyzed using SPSS 9.0 package.
RESULTS
In the negative condition, OCD group didn't show any deficit compared to healthy group. But SPR group showed significantly lower appropriate response rate than healthy group. In the combined condition, OCD and healthy control group showed 'negativity bias' which SPR group didn't show. In the positive condition, however, OCD and SPR groups did show significantly lower appropriate response rate than healthy controls.
CONCLUSION
Our results suggested that OCD patients may not have deficits in the processing of negative emotion even in the chronic phase but to have a specific deficit in positive emotion. This result supports the 'threat-relatedness hypothesis' on attentional bias of OCD.