Involuntary social cue integration in patients with obsessive compulsive disorder

Objective

Patients with obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD) have inferior social functioning compared to healthy controls, but the exact nature of these social deficits, and the underpinning mechanisms, are unknown. We sought to investigate social functioning in patients with OCD by measuring their involuntary/spontaneous processing of social cues using a specifically designed test, which might reveal deficits in these patients that explicit voluntary tasks do not detect.

Methods

The sample of the study consisted of an OCD group (n = 25) and a control group (n = 26). Both groups performed an adaptation of the Social Distance Judgment Task (SDJT; Jellema et al., 2009), in which participants have to judge the geometrical distance between two human cartoon figures presented on a computer screen. Head/gaze direction and body direction were manipulated to be either compatible, i.e. both directed to the left or to the right (Compatible condition) or incompatible, i.e. body directed toward the observer (frontal view) and head/gaze directed to the left or right (Incompatible condition).

Results

In the Compatible condition, controls nor OCD patients were influenced by the social cues in their judgments of the geometrical distances. However, in the Incompatible condition, where the attentional cue was more conspicuous, both groups were influenced by the cues, but the controls to a significantly larger extent than the OCD patients.

Conclusions

This study showed that patients with OCD are less likely, compared to controls, to automatically/spontaneously integrate the other’s direction of attention into their visual percept. This may have resulted in their judgments of the geometrical distances between the agents to be more accurate than those of controls. The suggested impairment in automatically integrating social cues may have important repercussions for the social functioning of OCD patients.