The Effect Of Obsessive-Compulsive Propensity And Inner Confidence State On Self-perception

Pathological doubt and uncertainty is one of the main symptoms of obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). The traditional definition of OCD proposed that OCD patients doubt not only their cognitive functions such as memory, attention, perception, decision-making, but also suspected of other internal states, such as feeling, preferences, desires, beliefs, etc. (Janet,1903; Rapoport,1989; Reed,1985; Shapiro, 1965). The persistent doubt and uncertainty will affect OCD individuals’ behaviors and cognition, and to produce a series of compulsive pathological behavior, such as washing, sorting, inspection, showing repeatedly seeking external assurance or confirmation (Dar et al.,2000; Nedeljkovic, Moulding, Kyrios, & Doron,2009). Lazarov et al. (2010) proposed Seeking Proxies for Internal States (SPIS) theory. The SPIS proposed that obsessive-compulsive individuals lack in subjective convictions about their own internal state, and that forced them to form and rely on external cues as a kind of compensation strategy to obtain reliable inner experience. The SPIS also presumed that the deficiency in subjective convictions was associated with the decreased level of confidence in one’s own internal state evaluation. However, there were studies suggesting that OCD individuals had subjective convictions, but the lack of confidence in the internal states lead to pathological doubt and uncertainty, dependent on external cues, resulting to the occurrence of a series of obsessive-compulsive symptoms (Radomsky & Alcolado, 2010).So, would the obsessive-compulsive individual’s subjective convictions and the level of confidence in ones’ own internal states lead to more reliance on external objective clues? Our research is to discuss the relationship between obsessive-compulsive tendencies and the confidence level of the inner state with self-perception by the false bio-feedback paradigm. In study 1, by examining the individuals with high and low tendencies to own subjective assessment of muscular tension, found that participants with high OC tendencies were more affected by false bio-feedback and showed lower confidence in their own judgments than participantswith low OC tendencies, indicating that high OC tendencies were more influenced by self-perception effects. In study 2, we manipulated the confidence in ones’own internal states in a random sample. And we found that the undermined confidence group was more easily influenced by the false bio-feedback than the control group, suggesting that the undermined confidence group was more affected by self-perception effects. But we can not figure out significant relationship between the severity of obsessive-compulsive symptoms and effects of self-consciousness in study 2. In study 3, we screened the high and low obsessive-compulsive tendencies and meanwhile manipulated the confidence in their own internal states. We found that:(1) individuals with high obsessive-compulsive tendencies showed more reliance on external objective cues than the individuals with low obsessive-compulsive tendencies no matter how they were manipulated about the confidence; (2) individuals with high obsessive-compulsive tendencies lacked in subjective convictions and had lower confidence in their own internal states, and those led to more reliance on external cues and to behave more self-perception effect.Our findings provide further evidence in support of the SPIS hypothesis and conclude that reliance on proxies to compensate for doubts in regard to internal states and confidence about internal states is associated with OC tendencies. However, due to the non-clinical samples, there is still a long way to examine the effects in clinical applications.