Temporal characteristics of moral disgust in obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) from a lexical perspective: An ERPs and sLORETA study

Abstract

Background

Although many studies have hinted at the essential role of moral disgust in obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), few studies focused on moral disgust have been reported. Exploring the temporal characterization of moral disgust can enhance our understanding of emotional processing.

Methods

This study included 58 patients with OCD and 45 healthy controls (HCs) and used an adapted lexical decision task paradigm (explicit LDT) combined with event-related potentials (ERPs) analysis and standardized low-resolution brain electromagnetic tomography analysis (sLORETA) to explore the performance of patients with OCD in processing moral disgust words.

Results

Compared to HCs, patients with OCD showed greater EPN amplitudes (P = 0.009), which are localized the occipital lobe, when confronted with moral disgust words. In the comparison between core disgust words and moral disgust words, no difference was found in the ERP time windows of interest in patients with OCD. Furthermore, no difference between LDT and explicit LDT was detected in patients with OCD.

Limitations

We did not include word class as a variable in the study.

Conclusions

Our results showed abnormalities in processing moral disgust in the early stage (EPN) of lexical processing in patients with OCD compared to HCs. And, we found no significant difference between moral disgust and core disgust at any stage of lexical processing. This suggested that, similar to core disgust, moral disgust in patients with OCD triggered automatic attention and elicited higher levels of emotional experience and arousal compared to HCs.