The present study investigated the relation of compulsive hoarding to other obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) symptoms in a sample of 162 patients with OCD. Obsessions and compulsions reported on the Anxiety Disorders Interview Schedule for DSM-IV were submitted to an exploratory factor analysis. Results suggested a four-factor model: "Certainty," "Contamination," "Obsessions," and "Numbers/O...

A decade before the rise of optogenetics, the first behavioral "circuit-test" - transgenically modulating the output of a genetically-specified brain circuit element to examine its effect on behavior - was performed. The behaviors emulated in those mice were comorbid tics and compulsions, elicited by a gene borrowed from cholera bacteria and tailored to intracellularly neuropotentiate glutamate...

BACKGROUND Acquiring and discarding objects are routine decision processes for most people. Despite the ubiquitous need to make such decisions, little is known about how they are made and what goes wrong when individuals acquire and fail to discard so many items that many areas of their home become unlivable (i.e., clinical hoarding). We hypothesize that clinical hoarding reflects a normal vari...

In the signal attenuation rat model of obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), lever-pressing for food is followed by the presentation of a compound stimulus which serves as a feedback cue. This feedback is later attenuated by repeated presentations of the stimulus without food (without the rat emitting the lever-press response). In the next stage, lever-pressing is assessed under extinction condi...

Seventy two patients fulfilling Research Diagnostic Criteria for obsessional illness were studied in detail from a phenomenological point of view. Frequency of various forms and contents of obsessions and compulsions were delineated. The forms of obsessions seen were; doubts (65%); thinking (52.7 %); fear (47.2%); magical thinking (36.1%); impulse (4.1%); image (4.1 %) and others (5.5%). In com...

PURPOSE The self-report version of the Yale-Brown Obsessive-Compulsive Scale (Y-BOCS) has been developed to overcome the limitations of the clinician-administered version, which needs to be executed by trained personnel and is time consuming. The second edition of the Y-BOCS (Y-BOCS-II) was developed to address some limitations of the original version. However, there is no self-report version o...

Obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) is a highly debilitating disorder. Fortunately there are treatments that help the majority of OCD sufferers. The behavioral treatment with the most empirical support for its efficacy is exposure and response prevention (EX/RP). Over the years in our supervision meetings and in our clinical practice we have noted a number of relatively common therapist pitfall...

AIM To validate a questionnaire for the diagnosis of orhorexia oervosa, an eating disorder defined as "maniacal obsession for healthy food". MATERIALS AND METHODS 525 subjects were enrolled. Then they were randomized into two samples (sample of 404 subjects for the construction of the test for the diagnosis of orthorexia ORTO-15; sample of 121 subjects for the validation of the test). The ORT...

Recent research has helped elucidate a potentially important mechanism by which repetitive, compulsive behavior leads to memory and perceptual distrust. Although the effects of repeated checking and perseverative staring have been investigated, no research to date has examined the impact of compulsive cleaning on cognitive confidence. This study examined the effect of repeated cleaning in a coh...

Although maladaptive and compulsive behaviors are increasingly well-described in young persons with Prader-Willi syndrome, it is unclear how these problems manifest in older adults with this syndrome. In Part I, I compared maladaptive and compulsive behaviors in 45 older adults with Prader-Willi syndrome (ages 30 to 50 years) to 195 children, adolescents, and young adults. Young adults were at ...