Validating the Italian Version of the Disgust and Propensity Scale-Revised

The aim of this work is to evaluate the factor structure and psychometric properties of the Italian version of the Disgust Propensity and Sensitivity Scale-Revised (DPSS-R, 16 items) in two samples taken from the general population. In the first study, 285 participants completed the DPSS-R questionnaire through a web-based survey. Exploratory factor analysis for ordinal Likert-type data supported the existence of four underlying factors, reflecting self-focused disgust, disgust propensity, somatic anxiety and disgust sensitivity. In the second study, an independent sample of 293 participants was enrolled as a test set to validate the factor structure obtained in the exploratory phase. The factor solution was confirmed, but showed quite highly correlated latent factors. We fitted the model and tested whether or not the bifactor structure was better than the previous one (four correlated factors). Actually, we had evidence supporting the presence of a general factor, providing a measure of disgust susceptibility, along with the four specific factors previously defined. This result could be useful also from the clinical perspective since the DPSS-R questionnaire will be used in clinical context, where underlying factors may be related to different and specific psychopathological profiles. Finally, we examined and visualized the interrelationships among the four DPSS-R factors and the external scales (Anxiety Sensitivity, Disgust Scale and Padua) using a graphical model approach

Who Has Done It? Exploring Gaze Agency in Obsessive-Compulsive Checkers

The sense of agency (SoA) is a multifaceted construct, which can be defined as the ability to understand the causal relationships between our actions and sensory events. Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD) patients with checking compulsions often report a “lack of action completion” sensations, which has been conceptualized in the so-called “Not Just Right Experiences” construct. An intriguing explanation of this phenomenon comes from Belayachi and Van der Linden (2009, 2010), who suggest that OCD-checking patients are more prone to specify their action in a relatively molecular and inflexible way. Currently, there are no studies in literature which address this issue in OCD patients, except for the one of Gentsch et al. (2012), who suggested an altered SoA in these patients. Here we exploited a novel construct, gaze agency, to evaluate causal attribution capabilities in a group of 21 OCD patients (checkers) and matched healthy controls (HCs). Basically, two tasks targeted observers’ capability to identify their own eye movements as the cause of concurrently presented beeps, which allowed us to measure agency sensitivity as well as subtle agency alterations in an ecological setting. We found a poorer performance in OCD patients as compared to HCs in many parameters of our tasks, suggesting a difficulty with causal attribution possibly due to both a reduced cognitive flexibility and a less functional gaze agency in OCD patients