Abstract
Although “not just right experiences” (NJREs) and disgust proneness (DP) have been increasingly implicated in the development and maintenance of obsessive–compulsive disorder (OCD), no studies to date have examined their conjoint effect. In the present study, structural equation modeling was used to examine the extent to which NJREs and DP were associated to OC symptoms in a sample composed of college students in a model which also included OC-related beliefs and negative affect. The results showed that NJREs and OC-beliefs, but not DP, were related to overall OC symptoms severity. Moreover, NJREs were associated to all the main OC symptoms dimensions (washing, checking, ordering, obsessing, and mental neutralization) whereas DP was associated with obsessing symptoms and, negatively, with mental neutralization. These findings underscore the importance of the continued examination of vulnerability factors such as NJREs and DP in enhancing our understanding of OCD.
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Notes
Indeed, a recent research showed that the general obsessive beliefs factor identified by the three scales of the OBQ-44 robustly predicted the latent OCD spectrum factor above and beyond the three distinct obsessive belief dimensions (Olatunji et al. 2019). The authors concluded that the OBQ-44 total score may be more useful in predicting OCD than the subscale scores.
The test of the multigroup invariance of this five-factor model exhibited an acceptable fit both for configural as well as metric invariance (See Online Resources).
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Claudio Sica, Corrado Caudek, Amparo Belloch, Gioia Bottesi, Marta Ghisi, GabrieleMelli, Gemma García-Soriano, Bunmi O. Olatunji, declare that they have no conflict of interest.
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Sica, C., Caudek, C., Belloch, A. et al. Not Just Right Experiences, Disgust Proneness and Their Associations to Obsessive–Compulsive Symptoms: A Stringent Test with Structural Equation Modeling Analysis. Cogn Ther Res 43, 1086–1096 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10608-019-10029-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10608-019-10029-8