UNLABELLED The potential adverse consequences, personal distress, shame and guilt presented by patients who suffer from sexual addiction require a more in-depth understanding of the phenomenology and psychobiology of this disorder. METHODS A bibliographic review was conducted using MEDLINE and EBSCO databases with the following keywords: "sexual addiction," "hypersexuality," "compulsive sexua...

Historically, obsessions and compulsions have been mentioned in the religious and nonscientific literature for centuries. Obsessivecompulsive features are not only present in individuals, but constitute an important part of collective rituals and ceremonies including magic and superstition (Meyer, 1968). The purpose of this paper will be focused on the medical aspects of obsessions and compulsi...

Deliberate ingestion of foreign bodies is not a new subject especially in our society where such patients are neglected and their problems are rarely investigated properly. These kinds of problems usually have a compulsive driven and complicated elements involved which are very refractory to treatment and are often repetitive. Such a habit is mostly seen in children of very tender age but the s...

In the past decade there has been an increasing interest in the levels of obsessive-compulsive symptoms (OCS) found in patients with schizophrenia or related disorders. The widely acknowledged gold standard measure of the severity of OCS is the content-free version of the Yale-Brown Obsessive-Compulsive Scale (Y-BOCS) (Goodman et al., 1989a,b). However, factor analytic research in patients with...

Religion has often been thought to play a part in the genesis of some cases of obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). In this study, we explored the relationship between religiosity, religious obsessions, and other clinical characteristics of OCD. Forty-five outpatients with OCD were evaluated with the Yale-Brown Obsessive-Compulsive Scale (Y-BOCS) and the Yale-Brown Obsessive-Compulsive Checklis...

Evaluating outcomes of behavior is a central function of the striatum. In circuits engaging the dorsomedial striatum, sensitivity to goal value is accentuated during learning, whereas outcome sensitivity is thought to be minimal in the dorsolateral striatum and its habit-related corticostriatal circuits. However, a distinct population of projection neurons in the dorsolateral striatum exhibits ...

The Yale Brown Obsessive-Compulsive scale (Y-BOCS) is a semi-structured interview considered to be the gold standard in the measurement of obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) severity, yet findings about its factorial structure are conflicting. This study aimed at comparing different models, and testing whether factorial structure differs along various sub-groups. Exploratory and confirmatory f...

Pregnancy is a well-recognised risk factor in precipitating obsessive-compulsive disorder. We present and discuss a case with the onset of obsessive-compulsive disorder in the fourth month of gestation, which fully recovered two weeks after delivery. The phenomenology of the observed disorder was similar to earlier reports of obsessive-compulsive disorder in pregnancy, i.e. the obsessions and c...

The Belgian Malinois (BM) is an excellent working dog that typically shows a circling behavior when placed in a confined space. Moreover, individuals showing moderate running in circles (one kind of obsessive compulsive behavior) in confined spaces typically show better work performance compared to those without the circling behavior or to those with a serious circling behavior (which can be de...

Previous research by Rachman and de Silva (1978, Behaviour Research and Therapy, 16, 233-248) and by Salkovskis and Harrison (1984, Behaviour Research and Therapy, 22, 549-552) has shown that abnormal and normal obsessions are similar in content. The present study examined whether the same is true for abnormal and normal rituals. A sample of normal subjects (N = 150) were asked about their idio...