An experimental study of hand washing in people with high and normative contamination fear
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Date
2021-01
Authors
Dean, Jasmine
Purdon, Christine
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Elsevier
Abstract
Compulsions are the hall mark of obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) but there has been surprisingly little
research on their phenomenology and persistence, and much of this work has focused on checking compulsions.
The current study examined hand wash duration in participants (N = 235) with high or normative contamination
fear who either “contaminated” their hands or not, under high vs. low responsibility/harm conditions. Key
findings were: 1) those high in contamination fear only washed “excessively” when under contamination
exposure/high responsibility conditions; 2) there was no insidious effect of hand wash duration on memory
confidence nor certainty it had been done properly; 3) there was little evidence of behavioural repetition during
the hand wash; 4) under contamination/high responsibility conditions hand wash goals were more likely to be
impossible and unverifiable (e.g., “get rid of all the germs”). We concluded that contextual factors influence hand
washing moreso than contamination fear, that repetition and its consequences may be less relevant for understanding
excessive washing, and that when treating OCD there could be merit in reframing compulsion goals, and
exposing people to uncertainty as to whether or not that goal was met by one performance of the compulsion.
Description
The final publication is available at Elsevier via http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jocrd.2020.100616. © 2021. This manuscript version is made available under the CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 license http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/
Keywords
OCD, compulsions, hand washing, contamination fear