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Mindfulness, Obsessive–Compulsive Symptoms, and Executive Dysfunction

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Abstract

Recent investigations have included mindfulness as a component of intervention for OCD. However, the extent to which processes underlying OCD interfere with mindfulness has not been examined. Limited research has examined neuropsychological functions as mechanisms to explain different levels of mindfulness across individuals. Research in OCD highlights impairment in visual/spatial working memory as possible unique deficits; these and other components of executive functioning may also be important for mindfulness. Participants (N = 103) exceeding clinical cutoffs on measures of OCD, depressive, or generalized anxiety symptoms, or were healthy controls, completed a self-report measure of mindfulness and computerized measures of working memory and cognitive inhibition. Results demonstrated the OCD group scored significantly lower than the anxiety and control groups on some facets of mindfulness. The OCD group performed significantly worse on visual but not spatial working memory compared to verbal working memory. Additionally, the OCD group showed significantly poorer performance on all working memory tasks compared to the control group but not in comparison to other groups. There were no significant differences between the OCD group and the depression group on any measure. Finally, regression models examining working memory and cognitive inhibition as predictors of mindfulness found some support for two of the five facets of mindfulness, though the individual predictors were not significant. Implications are discussed in the context of mindfulness and executive functioning in OCD in terms of future research and treatment.

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Notes

  1. This amount of compensation was chosen so as to be commensurate with the payment offered for other similar HITs posted in the Mechanical Turk marketplace at the time.

  2. The experimental task software was licensed on a monthly basis. Funding was only available for a limited time, preventing us from collecting a larger dataset.

  3. For all between-group comparisons in Hypotheses 1A and 1B, ANOVAs or ANCOVAs were conducted using either the OCD group (in the case of Hypothesis 1A) or the control group (in the case of Hypothesis 1B) as the group to which the others were compared. The t test results reported here between groups were generated from these ANOVA/ANCOVA analyses. Post-hoc tests were not run because the FDR correction rendered them unnecessary for statistical correction purposes.

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Funding

This study was funded by a Faculty Research Grant awarded by the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences of Fordham University to Dean McKay.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Psychology, Fordham University, 226 Dealy Hall, 441 E Fordham Road, Bronx, NY, 10458, USA

    Katherine Crowe & Dean McKay

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  1. Katherine Crowe
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  2. Dean McKay
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Correspondence to Katherine Crowe.

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Katherine Crowe and Dean McKay declare that they have no conflicts of interest.

Ethical Approval

All procedures performed in studies involving human participants were in accordance with the ethical standards of the institutional and/or national research committee and with the 1964 Helsinki declaration and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards.

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Informed consent was obtained from all individual participants included in the study.

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This research formed the basis for a Master’s Thesis by the first author under the supervision of the second author.

Appendices

Appendix: Supplemental Analyses of OCD Symptom Dimensions

Given the non-significant between-group differences found on two of the FFMQ subscales (Observing and Nonreactivity), it seemed possible that perhaps those subscales are not associated with OCD symptoms to the extent that the other three FFMQ subscales (Describing, Acting with Awareness, and Nonjudging) are. Correlations were examined between the six OCI-R symptom dimensions and each of the five FFMQ subscales. Contrary to predictions, no significant correlations were found between any of the OCI-R symptoms dimensions and the Describing, Acting with Awareness, or Nonjudging subscales. The only significant correlations found were between the Observing subscale and the OCI-R Ordering subscale (r = .44, p = .005) and between the Nonreactivity subscale and the OCI-R Hoarding subscale (r = .52, p = .001). Correlations between the Observing subscale and OCI-R Washing (r = .39, p = .013) and OCI-R Obsessing (r = .36, p = .021) were not significant after the FDR correction.

Supplemental Analyses of N-Back Tests

We conducted repeated measure ANOVAs with a Greenhouse-Geisser correction for the depression, generalized anxiety, and control groups as supplemental analyses.

There were significant differences across the three tasks within the depression group (F(1.74, 27.85) = 8.39, p = .002). Pairwise comparisons showed participants scored significantly worse on the object/visual n-back task than on the verbal n-back (p = .004) and than on the spatial n-back (p = .003); differences between participants’ scores on the spatial n-back and the verbal n-back were not significant.

Differences across the three tasks within the anxiety group were not significant after the FDR correction.

There were significant differences across the three tasks within the control group (F(1.49, 32.77) = 12.53, p < .001). Pairwise comparisons showed participants scored significantly worse on the object/visual n-back task than on the verbal n-back (p < .001). Differences between participants’ scores on the other tasks were not significant after the FDR correction.

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Crowe, K., McKay, D. Mindfulness, Obsessive–Compulsive Symptoms, and Executive Dysfunction. Cogn Ther Res 40, 627–644 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10608-016-9777-x

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