Manipulating meta-cognitive beliefs about the difficulty to suppress scratching: Implications for obsessive-compulsive disorder

The present study explored the effect of a meta-cognitive manipulation of suppression difficulty on post suppressional rebound of behavior. Non-clinical participants were asked to suppress scratching, while working on a questionnaire that presented scratching-related situations. Some participants received a meta-cognitive conceptualization of potential difficulty in executing the suppression task. Namely, they were either told that suppressing scratching is quite easy for everybody, or told that suppressing scratching is very difficult for everybody. Based on the Motivational Inference Model of Post-Suppressional Rebound (MIMO; Liberman & Förster, 2000; Förster & Liberman, 2001) we reasoned that participants would use the meta-cognitive conceptualization to infer their own motivation: those who received the Easy for Everybody instructions would consider their suppression failures to be indicative of their motivation to scratch, and therefore would scratch more. Conversely, participants who received the Difficult for Everybody instructions would consider their suppression failures as natural and noninformative, and consequently would be less motivated to scratch. In accordance with our predictions, the Easy for Everybody group scratched more than the Difficult for Everybody group, which was similar to a control group that completed the questionnaire without suppression instructions. The results are discussed in a broad meta-cognitive framework which examines the relations between suppression and meta-cognitive beliefs about suppression failures in cognitive and meta-cognitive theories of OCD.