The Relationship between Child Abuse and Cognitive Distortions with Clinical Symptoms of Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder: The Mediating Role of Emotion Dysregulation

Introduction: The present study has aimed to investigate the relationship between child abuse and cognitive distortion with clinical symptoms of obsessive-compulsive disorder moderated with emotion dysregulation. Method: This study made use of descriptive correlational research design. Structural equation modeling was used to explore the relationships between variables. The statistical population included all students of Urmia University in April 2019 (N=17000). The sample included 201 students who were selected by multi-stage cluster sampling. In this study, the Obsessive-Compulsive Inventory-Revised (OCI-R) (2002), the Child Abuse Scale (CAS) (1392), the Cognitive Distortions Scale (CDS) (1389) and Difficulty in Emotion Regulation Scale (DERS) (2004) were used to collect data. In order to analyze the data, descriptive and inferential statistics and used SPSS-21 and AMOS software were used. Results: Pearson correlation coefficient and structural equations modeling showed that the structural model has a good fit with data. In this research, the direct effect of child abuse on emotion dysregulation (β=0/46, P=0/002), child abuse on clinical symptoms of Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD) (β=0/43, P=0/003), cognitive distortions on emotion dysregulation (β=0/57, P=0/001), and cognitive distortions on clinical symptoms of OCD (β=0/51, P=0/001) were approved. The bootstrap test results showed significant indirect effects of child abuse and cognitive distortion on clinical symptoms of OCD which operate via emotion dysregulation. Conclusion: It seems that emotion dysregulation has a mediating role in the incidence of OCD. As a result, it is recommended to attend to OCD patient’s emotion dysregulation problems and educate them on the adaptive skills of emotion regulation.