(PS3-C63) Positive Affect in Obsessive-compulsive Disorder

While the role of negative affect in psychopathology has received considerable attention, positive affect (i.e., positive emotional experience and pleasurable engagement with one’s environment; Watson, Clark, & Carey, 1988) has been comparatively understudied in obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). However, in recent years, positive affect has emerged as an area of interest in anxiety and depression research (e.g., Craske et al., 2019). Positive affect may be particularly important in OCD, as this diagnosis has been associated with lower positive affect (e.g., Hwang et al., 2012) and higher positive affect has been found to predict better treatment response to exposure therapy in OCD in patients with “taboo” obsessions (Berman, 2019). There is also some suggestion that specific OCD symptom presentations may show unique relationships with positive affect. Grisham et al. (2005) found that individuals with both OCD and hoarding symptoms had lower positive affect compared to those with OCD alone. Watson, Clark, & Carey found that thoughts of harming a loved one was inversely related to positive affect in OCD. Thus, we sought to clarify the relation between positive affect and OCD symptom presentation, based on well-established OCD symptom subtypes (Pinto et al., 2007). Additionally, as positive affect has been tied to overall functioning (Moskowitz et al., 2012), we examined whether positive affect is associated with an individual’s degree of social and occupational functioning independent of their psychiatric symptoms, and whether any connection between positive affect and functioning may be better accounted for by depressive symptoms, given the high degree of comorbidity between OCD and depression. To investigate these questions, the present study used a sample of treatment-seeking individuals with a primary diagnosis of OCD who were enrolled in the Brown Longitudinal Obsessive-Compulsive Study (BLOCS; see Pinto et al., 2006). We proposed that hoarding and taboo thoughts would correspond to lower levels of positive affect. We also hypothesized that positive affect would be correlated with higher levels of social and occupational functioning, and that this relationship would remain even after accounting for symptoms of depression. Preliminary results suggested that positive affect had a significant inverse relationship with symmetry (r(124) = -0.29, p < 0.001) and hoarding (r(124) = -0.22, p = 0.02) symptom subtypes, but was not related to doubt, contamination, or taboo thoughts. As predicted, positive affect corresponded directly with degree of social and occupational function (r(124) = 0.35, p < 0.001); however this relationship did not persist after accounting for depressive symptoms (r(83) = 0.09, p = 0.37). These findings highlight the unique role that low positive affect may play in the etiology or maintenance of symmetry and hoarding symptoms.