Classical Conditioning in a Nonclinical Obsessive-Compulsive Population

Obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) is an intrusive and debilitating condition in which the individual experiences uncontrollable thoughts, compulsions, and urges. Successful treatments for OCD are based on Mowrer's theory of fear and avoidance behavior, which predicts that OCD subjects should show accelerated associative conditioning. This prediction was tested in two experiments that compared the classical eyeblink conditioning of OCD-like and control college students. OCD and control subjects learned normally and similarly when the conditioning procedure was accompanied by an active visual search background task (Experiment 1). However, when the background task was changed so that subjects passively viewed neutral pictures, OCD subjects conditioned significantly faster than control subjects (Experiment 2). Overall, the performance of all subjects in Experiment 1 was superior to the performance of subjects in Experiment 2.