Attentional Bias For Disgust Faces Of High And Low Obsessive Compulsive Washing Individuals

The results of the studies on Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD)’s attentional bias toward threaten stimuli of are still hot-debated, also, few studies have investigated the sub-clinical obsessive-compulsive individual. In a series of three experiments, the present study investigated the attentional bias toward threaten stimuli and the underlying mechanism by using high and low obsessive compulsive washing people.The first experiment adopted dot-probe paradigm and using disgusting and fearful faces as prime, the result showed that (a) under both emotional facial conditions, all participants reacted more slowly when the location of the prime was incongruent with the location of the probe than when the location of the prime was congruent with the probe, suggesting that all participants had attentional bias toward the emotional faces;(b) when the prime was disgust face, high obsessive compulsive washing individuals showed greater bias than low obsessive compulsive washing individuals, but there was no significant difference when the fearful face was prime. These findings indicated that disgust facial expression was more salient to high obsessive compulsive washing individuals.To confirm the attentional bias to disgust face on the high obsessive compulsive washing individuals, the primes were presented subliminally in the second experiment, which combined the continuous flashing inhibition paradigm and the dot-probe paradigm, gaving participants the disgust and fear faces as primes under the perception threshold. The results showed that high obsessive compulsive washing individuals exhibited attentional bias both to disgust and fearful faces; in contrast, the low obsessive compulsive washing individuals only showed attentional bias toward fearful stimuli. These results implied that the disgust stimuli were threatening even when they were presented subliminally. This probably because high obsessive compulsive washing individuals regarding the disgust materials as highly threatening stimuli.To find out the underlying mechanism of the attentional bias toward disgust facial expression on high obsessive compulsive washing individuals, Binocular rivalry were employed in the third experiment, which presented the fearful and disgust faces to each eye of participants simultaneously. The results demostrates that (a) the attentional orientation of high obsessive compulsive washing individuals did not show difference toward disgust and fear, while low obsessive compulsive washing individuals oriented their attention to fearful faces;(b) high obsessive compulsive washing individuals would maintain their attention on disgust faces, whereas low obsessive compulsive washing individuals did not show any difference when they maintained their attention on the two emotional faces. These results indicated that the reason of high obsessive compulsive washing individuals’ attentional bias may lie in the difficult to disengage the attention from the stimuli, instead of attentional orientation.