Decision-making In High And Low Obsessive Compulsive Individuals

As an important social adaptation ability, decision-making is the new hot spot of psychology research. But so far, the studies for obsessive-compulsive disorder(OCD) patients’ decision-making have not got a consistent conclusion, while seldom researchers study on the decision making of non-clinical obsessive-compulsive individuals. In order to make up the deficiency of previous studies, this study tries to examine the characteristics of high obsessive-compulsive (HOC) and lowobsessive-compulsive (LOC) individuals’ decision-making by three experiments.Experiments1investigated HOC and LOC individuals’ decision-making using the Iowa Gambling Task. The results showed that HOC individuals were impaired in decision-making compared with LOC individuals. They chose more cards than LOC individuals from disadvantage decks, which cost the most in the long run.Experiments2investigated HOC and LOC individuals’decision-making using a variant versin of the gambling task, in which we reversed the order of reward and punishment. The results showed that as the task progressed, LOC individuals gradually shifted their preference towards to the advantage decks and away from the disadvantage decks. By contrast, HOC individuals failed to demonstrate this shift in behaviour and they selectd more cards from the disadvantage decks.Experiment3mainly aimed to investigate whether the frequency or magnitude of delayed punishment relative to immediate reward would affect HOC and LOC individuals’ decision-making. We found that expanding the frequency or magnitude of delayed punishment didn’t change the performance of HOC individuals in the task, and they also chose more cards from disadvantage decks than LOC individuals.Summing up the result of three experiments,we could get conclusions as follows:First, HOC individuals trully have deficit in decision-making, which can not be due to their over sensitivity to reward or insensitivity to punishment. Second, the deficit of HOC individuals’ decision-making is not affected by the frequency or magnitude of reward and punishment, which likes an inherent quality. Finally, the deficit of HOC individuals’decision-making may originate from that they are insensitive to the future, and so they make decisions based on immediate information. They pay more attentions to the immediate interests regardless of the long-term outcomes.