“If I feel disgusted, I must be getting ill”: Emotional reasoning in the context of contamination fear

• Published in: Behaviour research and therapy 2013-03, Vol.51 (3), p.122-127
• Main Authors: Verwoerd, Johan, de Jong, Peter J., Wessel, Ineke, van Hout, Wiljo J.P.J.
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Adult; Adult and adolescent clinical studies; Affectivity. Emotion; Anxiety; Anxiety disorders; Anxiety disorders. Neuroses; Biological and medical sciences; Contamination; Contamination fear; Disgust; Emotional reasoning; Emotions; Fear; Fear & phobias; Fear - psychology; Female; Fundamental and applied biological sciences. Psychology; Humans; Male; Medical sciences; Mental health care; Obsessive-compulsive disorders; OCD; Personality. Affectivity; Phobic Disorders - psychology; Psychology. Psychoanalysis. Psychiatry; Psychology. Psychophysiology; Psychopathology. Psychiatry; Risk; Risk assessment; Scripts; Suffering; Surveys and Questionnaires; Young Adult
• ISSN: 0005-7967; 1873-622X
• DOI: 10.1016/j.brat.2012.11.005

Patients suffering from anxiety disorders have been shown to infer danger on the basis of their anxiety responses “if I feel anxious, there must be danger.” This tendency logically hampers the identification of false alarms and may thus act in a way to confirm the a priori threat value of the feared stimuli/situations. Since disgust is assumed to play a critical role in the persistence of contamination fears in OCD, the question rises whether individuals suffering from fear of contamination perhaps similarly infer danger on the basis of their disgust response: “If I feel disgusted, it must be contagious.” Therefore, this study tested whether indeed disgust-based reasoning might be involved in fear of contamination. On the basis of the contamination fear subscale of the Padua Inventory (PI), we selected a group of participants scoring higher than the established clinical range (n = 31, PI > 13) and a group of participants low (n = 27, PI