Researchers at the Bellvitge Hospital in Barcelona, in collaboration with experts from the Hospital del Mar and the University of Melbourne (Australia), have verified thatobsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) patients have greater moral sensitivityand showbiggest concern.
Using functional magnetic resonance imaging techniques, the experts studied the neurofunctional bases of this increased moral sensitivity. Thus, the brain activations of a group of 73 patients with OCD and 73 healthy controls were measured in the presence of various moral problems, in which the subjects had to choose between two alternatives with very negative consequences. For example, they were askedthe crying baby dilemma, classic in philosophy classes. The participants in a war were hypothetically placed in which enemy soldiers stalk their village and all the neighbors hide in a basement in which there is a baby who begins to cry. If someone doesn’t shut him up, the soldiers will find out. Would it be lawful to drown his crying, at the risk of suffocating him, to save everyone else?
The brain activations shown before this moral question were compared with those shown before trivial choices, such as choosing between the field or the beach to spend a weekend. The results verified thatsubjects with OCD experience greater activation than controls during situations of moral dilemma in regions of the orbitofrontal cortex, especially in its medial part, a region related to decision-making processes and the development of the feeling of morality.
“These data allow for the first time to objectify the existence of brain dysfunctions related to alterations in complex cognitions, such as the feeling of morality”, explains to the SINC agency Carles Soriano, a researcher at the Catalan hospital and one of the authors of the work published in theArchives of General Psychiatry.
Types of OCD
OCD is characterized by persistent thoughts, called obsessions, that produce fear or worry, and by repetitive behaviors, called compulsions, aimed at reducing associated anxiety. It affects 2% of the population. Different types of affected patients can be differentiated. “Most are characterized by pollution obsessions and cleaning compulsions, or by doubting whether they have correctly carried out some important actions, such as turning off the gas, which leads them to repeatedly check if they have carried out such actions,” says Soriano.
There are also other types of obsessions and compulsions, such as those presented by patients who need the objects around them to be perfectly ordered and in symmetry, or those presented by patients who accumulate various types of objects that they cannot get rid of.
Finally, there are also patients with involuntary and unwanted thoughts of a sexual or religious nature, who doubt that they have carried out some type of sexual behavior that is not acceptable to them or that they have blasphemed. “This last group of patients is identified precisely because they present a higher degree of moral hypersensitivity “, concludes the researcher.
