title: Obsessive-compulsive disorder as a disturbance of security motivation.
abstract: The authors hypothesize that the symptoms of obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), despite their apparent nonrationality, have what might be termed an epistemic origin--that is, they stem from an inability to generate the normal "feeling of knowing" that would otherwise signal task completion and terminate the expression of a security motivational system. The authors compare their satiety-signal construct, which they term yedasentience, to various other senses of the feeling of knowing and indicate why OCD-like symptoms would stem from the abnormal absence of such a terminator emotion. In addition, they advance a tentative neuropsychological model to explain its underpinnings. The proposed model integrates many previous disparate observations and concepts about OCD and embeds it within the broader understanding of normal motivation.
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychiatry and Behavioural Neurosciences, McMaster University, Hamilton, ON, Canada. szechtma@mcmaster.ca
authors.forename: Henry
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Szechtman
authors.forename: Erik
authors.initials: E
authors.lastname: Woody
mesh_terms: D000339:Affect; D000818:Animals; D003463:Cues; D006801:Humans; D007389:Internal-External Control; D019359:Knowledge; D008960:Models, Psychological; D009042:Motivation; D009771:Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder / Q000523:psychology*; D011936:Reality Testing; D012528:Satiety Response