Background: Exposure and response prevention is effective and recommended as the first choice for treating obsessive-compulsive disorders (OCD). Its mechanisms of action are rarely studied, but two major theories make distinct assumptions: while the emotional processing theory assumes that treatment effects are associated with habituation within and between exposure sessions, the inhibitory learning approach highlights the acquisition of additional associations, implying alternative mechanisms like expectancy violation. The present study aimed to investigate whether process variables derived from both theories predict short-term outcome.
Method: In a university outpatient unit, 110 patients (63 female) with OCD received manual-based cognitive-behavioral therapy with high standardization of the first two exposure sessions. Specifically, therapists repeated the first exposure session identically and assessed subjective units of distress as well as expectancy ratings in the course of exposure sessions. Based on these data, individual scores for habituation and distress-related expectancy violation were calculated and used for prediction of both percentage change on the Yale-Brown Obsessive-Compulsive Scale (Y-BOCS) and remission status after 20 therapy sessions.
Results: In a multiple regression model for percentage change, within-session habituation during the first exposure was a significant predictor, while in a logistic regression predicting remission status, distress-related expectancy violation during the first exposure revealed significance. A path model further supported these findings.
Conclusions: The results represent first evidence for distress-related expectancy violation and confirm preliminary findings for habituation, suggesting that both processes contribute to treatment benefits of exposure in OCD, and both mechanisms appear to be independent.
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http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s12888-022-03701-z | DOI Listing |
BMC Psychiatry
January 2025
Department of Public Health, School of Public Health and Safety, Shahid Beheshti University of Medical Sciences, Tehran, Iran.
Background: Relapse is by far the most likely outcome of any smoking cessation attempt. The present study aimed to assess the effectiveness of cognitive-behavioral intervention based on Marlatt's model on relapse prevention of people who smoke.
Methods: This interventional study was conducted among 265 people who smoke who referred to smoking cessation centers in Kurdistan province in Iran (intervention group = 129, control group = 136).
Commun Biol
January 2025
Department of Psychology, The University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, China.
Traditional decision-making models conceptualize humans as adaptive learners utilizing the differences between expected and actual rewards (prediction errors, PEs) to maximize outcomes, but rarely consider the influence of violations of emotional expectations (emotional PEs) and how it differs from reward PEs. Here, we conducted a fMRI experiment (n = 43) using a modified Ultimatum Game to examine how reward and emotional PEs affect punishment decisions in terms of rejecting unfair offers. Our results revealed that reward relative to emotional PEs exerted a stronger prediction to punishment decisions.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFFront Hum Neurosci
January 2025
Center for Tactile Internet With Human-in-the-Loop, Technical University of Dresden, Dresden, Germany.
Introduction: The detection of, and adaptation to delayed visual movement feedback has been extensively studied. One important open question is whether the Weber-Fechner Laws hold in the domain of visuomotor delay; i.e.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPeerJ
January 2025
Department of Infectious Diseases and Public Health, Jockey Club College of Veterinary Medicine and Life Sciences, City University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, Hong Kong SAR, China.
Recognition plays a key role in the social lives of gregarious species, enabling animals to distinguish among social partners and tailor their behaviour accordingly. As domesticated animals regularly interact with humans, as well as members of their own species, we might expect mechanisms used to discriminate between conspecifics to also apply to humans. Given that goats can combine visual and vocal cues to recognise one another, we investigated whether this cross-modal recognition extends to discriminating among familiar humans.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFCurr Top Behav Neurosci
January 2025
Black Dog Institute, University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia.
Anxiety disorders in children lead to substantial impairment in functioning and development. Even the most effective gold standard treatments for childhood anxiety have 50% remission rates, suggesting a critical need to improve current treatments. Optimising exposure, the key component of anxiety treatments, represents a promising way to do so.
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