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Compulsivity is measurable across distinct psychiatric symptom domains and is associated with familial risk and reward-related attentional capture

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 October 2019

Lucy Albertella*
Affiliation:
School of Psychological Sciences and Turner Institute for Brain and Mental Health, Monash University, Clayton, Victoria, Australia
Samuel R. Chamberlain*
Affiliation:
Department of Psychiatry, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, United Kingdom Department of Psychiatry, Cambridge and Peterborough NHS Foundation Trust, Cambridge, United Kingdom
Mike E. Le Pelley
Affiliation:
School of Psychology, UNSW Sydney, New South Wales, Australia
Lisa-Marie Greenwood
Affiliation:
School of Psychological Sciences and Turner Institute for Brain and Mental Health, Monash University, Clayton, Victoria, Australia School of Psychology, University of Wollongong, Wollongong, New South Wales, Australia Illawarra Health and Medical Research Institute, University of Wollongong, Wollongong, New South Wales, Australia
Rico SC Lee
Affiliation:
School of Psychological Sciences and Turner Institute for Brain and Mental Health, Monash University, Clayton, Victoria, Australia
Lauren Den Ouden
Affiliation:
School of Psychological Sciences and Turner Institute for Brain and Mental Health, Monash University, Clayton, Victoria, Australia
Rebecca A. Segrave
Affiliation:
School of Psychological Sciences and Turner Institute for Brain and Mental Health, Monash University, Clayton, Victoria, Australia
Jon E. Grant*
Affiliation:
Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Neuroscience, University of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois, USA
Murat Yücel*
Affiliation:
School of Psychological Sciences and Turner Institute for Brain and Mental Health, Monash University, Clayton, Victoria, Australia
*
*Dr Lucy Albertella, Email: lucy.albertella@monash.edu
*Dr Samuel Chamberlain, Email: src33@cam.ac.uk
Jon E. Grant and Murat Yücel are joint senior authors
Jon E. Grant and Murat Yücel are joint senior authors
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Abstract

Background.

Compulsivity can be seen across various mental health conditions and refers to a tendency toward repetitive habitual acts that are persistent and functionally impairing. Compulsivity involves dysfunctional reward-related circuitry and is thought to be significantly heritable. Despite this, its measurement from a transdiagnostic perspective has received only scant research attention. Here we examine both the psychometric properties of a recently developed compulsivity scale, as well as its relationship with compulsive symptoms, familial risk, and reward-related attentional capture.

Methods.

Two-hundred and sixty individuals participated in the study (mean age = 36.0 [SD = 10.8] years; 60.0% male) and completed the Cambridge-Chicago Compulsivity Trait Scale (CHI-T), along with measures of psychiatric symptoms and family history thereof. Participants also completed a task designed to measure reward-related attentional capture (n = 177).

Results.

CHI-T total scores had a normal distribution and acceptable Cronbach’s alpha (0.84). CHI-T total scores correlated significantly and positively (all p < 0.05, Bonferroni corrected) with Problematic Usage of the Internet, disordered gambling, obsessive-compulsive symptoms, alcohol misuse, and disordered eating. The scale was correlated significantly with history of addiction and obsessive-compulsive related disorders in first-degree relatives of participants and greater reward-related attentional capture.

Conclusions.

These findings suggest that the CHI-T is suitable for use in online studies and constitutes a transdiagnostic marker for a range of compulsive symptoms, their familial loading, and related cognitive markers. Future work should more extensively investigate the scale in normative and clinical cohorts, and the role of value-modulated attentional capture across compulsive disorders.

Information

Type
Original Research
Creative Commons
Creative Common License - CCCreative Common License - BY
This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Copyright
© Cambridge University Press 2019
Figure 0

Figure 1. Sequence of trial events in the visual search task. Participants responded to the orientation of the line segment (horizontal or vertical) within the diamond (target). One of the nontarget circles could be a colour singleton distractor. Fast, correct responses to the target received monetary reward, depending on the distractor colour. A distractor rendered in a high-reward colour signalled that this was a bonus trial on which a large reward could be won. If instead the search display contained a distractor rendered in a low-reward colour (or did not contain a colour singleton distractor), then the trial was a standard trial on which only a small reward was available. Slower response times (RTs) on trials with a high-reward distractor than trials with a low-reward distractor demonstrate value-modulated attentional capture (VMAC).

Figure 1

Figure 2. Distribution of CHI-T total scores in the sample. Left—histogram; middle—box-whisker plot (the red bracket defines the shortest half of the data ie, the densest region); and right—Normal Quantile Plot.

Figure 2

Table 1. Correlations between CHI-T total scores and different compulsive symptom domains.

Figure 3

Figure 3. Standardized model coefficients for PLS model, linking each explanatory (X) variable to CHI-T scores (Y). All explanatory variables were statistically significant predictors of higher CHI-T scores (p < 0.05, bootstrap) except for family history of psychotic spectrum disorder.

Figure 4

Figure 4. A scatterplot of VMAC score (response time for trials with a distractor that signaled high-reward minus response time for trials with a distractor that signaled low-reward) as a function of CHI-T score.

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