Hypervigilance in patients with obsessive-compulsive disorder

Abstract

The hypothesis that patients with obsessive‐compulsive disorder (OCD) suffer from hypervigilant attention was investigated via explicit memory (incidental recall and recognition) and priming (reading speed) measures. OCD patients did not differ from normal controls on explicit measures of memory; specifically, recognition of unusual words (experiment 1) and recall and recognition of words and feature‐specific information (experiment 2). Although both normal controls and OCD patients showed priming, the pattern of priming differed for the two groups (experiment 2). Specifically, patients with OCD failed to show feature‐specific priming, suggesting they may have attended more focally on the priming task than did normal controls. These findings support previous reports of normal performance in OCD on explicit memory tasks, but suggest more sensitive measures may reflect differences in processing information. Anxiety 2:123–129 (1996). © 1996 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.

Neuropsychological Findings in Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder and its Potential Implications for Treatment

“…Several studies have investigated the implicit memory in patients with OCD [126][127][128][129][130]. Although most of them could not find any significant dysfunction, Rauch et al [128] observed that individuals with OCD "recruited" central nervous system structures normally involved in explicit learning (medial temporal lobes) during the performance of tasks of implicit learning and suggested that the systems underlying the functioning of the later (located in the lower striatum) might be impaired in these patients.…”

Sind Fibromyalgiepatienten "hypervigilant"?

“…Hypervigilanz im Sinn einer Eigenschaft kann demnach als eine situationsüber-greifend erhöhte Aufmerksamkeit oder Wachheit für bestimmte sensorische Stimuli interpretiert werden. Andere Ansätze operationalisieren Hypervigilanz als generell erhöhte Wahrnehmungsgeschwindigkeit und schnellere Aufnahme von Reizen [41], als verstärkte Reaktion auf Störreize während der Konzentration auf andere Stimuli [7], als eingeschränkte Gedächtnisleistung infolge verstärkt negativer Primingeffekte [41] oder auch als Unsicherheit, zwischen relevanten und irrelevanten Reizen zu unterscheiden [15]. McDermid et al [27] kennzeichneten FM-Patienten als "generalisiert hypervigilant" aufgrund der Vielzahl körperlicher Beschwerden, multilokulär erniedrigter taktiler Aversions-und Schmerzschwellen und gesenkter Schwellen unterschiedlicher Sinnesmodalitäten.…”

The effect of need and ability to achieve cognitive structuring on cognitive structuring.

“…For example, non–clinically compulsive individuals have been found to have relative difficulty in category creation and use (Frost et al, 1988). Similarly Wiggs, Martin, Altemus, and Murphy (1996) concluded that clinical compulsives spontaneously focus their attention on the typography of a word, whereas normal controls attend to the entire word. Another example of an inability to filter out schema (e.g., self-schemata) -incongruent contents that is accompanied by motivation to maintain positive self-esteem and ego integrity is constituted by the ideal type of sensitizer (Byrne, 1961; Byrne, Barry, & Nelson, 1963).…”