Misinterpretations of intrusions, obsessive beliefs and thought control strategies in patients with obsessive-compulsive disorder

Objective: Misinterpretations of intrusive experiences are suggested to play critical role in the development and maintenance of obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). Some faulty belief domains are also assumed to contribute to the immediate misappraisal of intrusions and thus, patients with OCD try to control their thoughts with various thought control strategies. This study aims to examine these cognitive concepts among Turkish patients with OCD and comparatively review the psychometric characteristics of three instruments in clinical samples. Methods: The sample of the study was constituted of patients with OCD and any other anxiety disorders and undergraduate university students as control group. An instrument set on immediate misinterpretations, beliefs, control strategies, responsibility attitudes, fusions of thoughts and actions, thought suppression, OCD symptoms, self-esteem and personality characteristics was administered to the sample. Results: Having acceptable reliability values, instrument tools of immediate interpretations, beliefs and thought control methods were found to be higher in OCD patients. These three factors were found to be significantly associated with other relevant cognitive correlates, while they were not related to some other factors such as psychoticism. Conclusion: These findings show that misinterpretations of intrusions, beliefs and control methods are also valid concepts in Turkish clinical samples that live in a different cultural context, and the self-report instruments of these cognitive factors were shown to display satisfactory psychometric properties.