Action awareness in obsessive compulsive disorder
Research type
Research Study
Full title
Action awareness in obsessive compulsive disorder
IRAS ID
166749
Contact name
Guido Orgs
Contact email
Sponsor organisation
Goldsmiths, University of London
Duration of Study in the UK
1 years, 6 months, 1 days
Research summary
Obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) is the second most frequent psychological disorder. Checking and washing are the most common compulsions, affecting around 2/3 of adults with OCD. Compulsive checking involves a vicious circle in which more checking paradoxically leads to less confidence in memory and impairs attention. In this study we aim to understand the role of awareness of one’s own actions in compulsive behavior. Recent accounts of OCD emphasize excessive formation of habits and inflexibility of goal-directed actions as a core mechanism in producing symptoms such as high levels of stress and anxiety and feelings of incompleteness. In this research project, we will use tasks from dance training and choreography to encourage patients to pay extra attention to the way it feels to perform their compulsions. For example we will ask patients to break down an action into its components or perform the movements at different speeds or with a different hand. The goal is to train higher awareness and memory for an otherwise “automatic” compulsive action and to break down excessive habits. We will assess how increased action awareness alters a patient’s performance in standard neuropsychological tests and physiologically measure movement acceleration and arousal, including heart rate and skin conductance using latest wrist sensor technology. We predict that increased action awareness may reduce the frequency of excessive habits by turning them into consciously performed goal-directed actions.
REC name
East of England - Cambridge Central Research Ethics Committee
REC reference
15/EE/0212
Date of REC Opinion
22 Jul 2015
REC opinion
Further Information Favourable Opinion