It's the Feeling Inside My Head: A Qualitative Analysis of Mental Contamination in Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: It was recently proposed that feelings of dirtiness and pollution can arise in the absence of physical contact with a contaminant. At present, there is limited data regarding the qualitative features of this construct of "mental contamination", although it is hypothesized to be particularly relevant to Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD), where compulsive washing in response to contamination fear is a common symptom presentation (Rachman, 2006). AIMS AND METHOD: The aim of this research was to explore the qualitative features of mental contamination in 20 people with contamination-based OCD, using a semi-structured interview. RESULTS: All participants reported times when they had felt dirty or contaminated in the absence of physical contact with a dirty or dangerous object. Mental contamination generated diffuse feelings of internal dirtiness not localized to the hands, which evoked urges to wash (100% participants), neutralize (80% participants) and avoid (85% participants). CONCLUSIONS: In support of the theory outlined by Rachman (2006), mental contamination was found to take a number of forms, be primarily associated with a human source, generate internal dirtiness and cause emotional distress and urge to wash. The clinical implications of these findings are discussed and ideas for future research are proposed.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| 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 it