People with obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) experience a lot more anxiety where morality issues are concerned. This leads the authors of a new research study to assert that patients with OCD are much more morally sensitive than people without the disorder.
"Faced with a problem of this type, people suffering from this type of anxiety disorder show that they worry considerably more," said Carles Soriano, co-leader of the study from the Hospital de Mar, Barcelona, Spain. OCD is a chronic condition with persistent and repetitive thoughts and compulsive behaviors. Approximately 2 percent of all people are affected by OCD to some degree.
Using an fMRI, researchers could see how the volunteers' brains responded when faced with a moral dilemma. They studied the responses of 146 people, 73 with OCD and 73 without. The volunteers had to make a choice between two courses of action, neither of which had a positive outcome.
Cerebral dysfunction associated with morality
“The brain activations displayed by participants in the face of such a moral question were compared to those displayed for trivial choices, like choosing between going to the countryside or the beach for the weekend,” explained Soriano.
"The data allows us for the first time to objectify the existence of cerebral dysfunctions related to alterations in complex cognitions, such as experiencing morality. This allows us to expand further on the characterization of altered cerebral mechanisms in OCD."
They found that when confronted by a dilemma, people with OCD had significantly higher activity in the orbitofrontal cortex, which is associated with decision-making and the development of moral sentiment.
Source: MedicalNewsToday, Archives of General Psychiatry
