Anxiety Sensitivity

The central theme of this article is discovering the relationship between the symptoms of OCD, and AS, or anxiety sensitivity. AS is the tendency for a person to confuse the sensations of anxiety and stress and actual warnings of social, physical, or psychological illnesses. For example, when one gets nervous before, say a concert recital, their stomach may start to hurt due to the stress and anxiety. However, people with higher anxiety sensitivity can develop fear of these rather harmless symptoms because they feel that this stomach pain from anxiety leads to illness and eventually death. Basically, this study is trying to discover a relationship between the three dimensions of anxiety sensitivity (fear of anxiety in social situations, fear of anxiety due to fears of physical illness, and fear of anxiety in their mind) and the symptoms of OCD. OCD is also split into different factors, which are: fear of contamination, and using de-contamination rituals, frequently performing checking rituals to make sure there are no mistakes, need for arranging and ordering rituals, and lastly, frequent thoughts of violent, sexual, and religious themes. Because those suffering from the unacceptable thoughts of OCD frequently feared of loss of control of their harmful thoughts, the researchers hypothesized that this dimension of OCD is related to the cognitive dimension of AS, where the person also fears for loss of control of their thoughts. The researchers also hypothesized that the OCD sufferers who frequently practiced de-contamination rituals, showed that the contamination dimension of OCD related to the physical dimension of AS, in that both have a fear of contracting a physical illness, through checking bodily sensations and symptoms. The researchers' methods were simple, and similar to those used in this Introductory Psychology class: the researchers gave out credits to Introductory Psychology students who participated in the survey, giving them an incentive. These participants answered four questionnaires: the ASI-3, or the Anxiety Sensitivity Index-3, which is an 18 question survey that measures fear of the consequences of anxious arousal in those surveyed, the Center for Epidemiological Studies-Depression Scale, which asks questions such as how often a person has felt sad or sleepy over the past week to measure how depressed the person in question is, the Obsessive Beliefs Questionnaire, which measures dysfunctional beliefs which can eventually lead to obsessions, and lastly, the Dimensional Obsessive-Compulsive Scale, which measures the severity of the four dimensions of OCD in a person through time spent in rituals, measures of avoidance behavior, measures of associated distress, how much the OCD interferes with normally functioning, and measures of how difficult it is to stop these obsessions and rituals. In their results, the researchers discovered first of all that the physical dimension of AS, that anxiety related bodily symptoms