A diary study of the phenomenology and persistence of compulsions
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES: Research on the persistence of compulsions has found that, when making the decision to stop a compulsion, people with OCD weigh sensory and memory information as more important than external criteria. At the same time, research has also found that repetition of behaviour has a deleterious effect on memory, sensory and cognitive confidence. These findings have important treatment implications but they are almost exclusively laboratory based. This study sought to examine compulsions as they occur in vivo using a structured diary format. METHODS: 22 People with a principal diagnosis of OCD completed measures of memory, sensory and cognitive confidence and used a structured diary to report on three compulsive episodes a day for three days. RESULTS: Despite repetition, a sense of certainty or the "right" feeling was achieved in over half of the compulsive episodes. The outcome of compulsive episodes was not influenced by distress over the obsession, nor was distress associated with negative beliefs about obsessions. Episodes in which certainly was not achieved were characterized by greater repetitions, greater memory, cognitive and sensory doubt and less certainty that the compulsion had been done properly. LIMITATIONS: The sample size was modest, checking compulsions were over-represented and data were based on retrospective self-report, albeit 2-h on average. CONCLUSIONS: Consistent with laboratory studies, repetition has insidious effects on the persistence of compulsions. However, compulsions yielded a sense of certainty half the time, despite repetitions.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.012 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".