Event-related potentials and presaccadic activity in response to affective stimuli in participants with obsessive-compulsive disorder

Individuals with obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) have difficulty with regulating their emotions and show reduced functioning of inhibitory control. It was reported previously that OCD patients had delayed antisaccade response and increased error rate only when affective pictures with negative valence served as fixation stimuli in “the antisaccade emotional fixation task”. Complementary to the previous research, eye movements and late positive potential (LPP) for fixation stimuli and the presaccadic positivity (PSP) and spike potential (SP) before saccade onset, were compared in two groups of OCD and healthy volunteers. Both groups exhibited increased fixation on emotional images, particularly on unpleasant ones, and showed heightened LPP responses without significant between-group differences. However, individuals with OCD had lower PSP and SP amplitudes for unpleasant images compared to the control group, although there were no differences within conditions for each group. These results suggest that while both groups displayed similar effects of unpleasant images on the involuntary orientation of attention, the findings on presaccadic potentials correlate with behavioral data on increased error rate in antisaccade tasks in OCD. This suggests that emotional dysregulation may contribute to impaired inhibitory control in individuals with OCD.