A thousand people will participate in the study in order to work on the psychological prevention of Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder and Body-Centered Repetitive Behaviors.
The Center of Applied Psychology of the Department of Health Psychology of the Miguel Hernández University of Elche (UMH) in collaboration with the University of Alicante (UA) and the Catholic University San Antonio of Murcia (UCAM), initiates a research study focused on Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD) and Body-Centered Repetitive Behaviors (BCCB). This study has been funded by the Alicia Koplowitz Foundation and has the support of the Spanish OCD Associations, TOC Levante and TOC Murcia, and the Spanish branch of the TLC Foundation focused on CRCCs.
The launch of the study coincides with the month-long International CRCC Awareness Week, October 1-7, which aims to raise public awareness of these largely unknown, yet very common, conditions.
The research project “OCD-Spectrum: Predictive Models of Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder-Related Disorders” aims to examine risk and protective factors for certain OCD-related disorders, such as Trichotillomania and Excoriation Disorder. Both disorders are considered to be Body-Centered Repetitive Behaviors (BCCB), a new grouping of obsessive-compulsive-type disorders that has been included in the latest version of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5).
As explained by the research team, the importance of working on these disorders lies in the scarcity of study literature focused on the protective and risk factors associated with these conditions. Behavioral alterations that start mostly in adolescence and are aggravated by anxious-depressive symptoms, leading to a high associated disability for the people who present them.
This is the first study that focuses on this symptomatology in Spain. To this end, for approximately 20 months, 1000 people aged 14 years and older who speak Spanish (the only requirements for participating in the study) with or without the presence of obsessive-compulsive symptomatology, will carry out an online survey: https://bit.ly/espectrotoc
The research team especially requests the participation of the university communities. In addition, the people participating in the whole study will be entered into a draw for one of the 15 Amazon cards worth 100 euros.
In this way, the aim is to obtain data on the presence and absence of symptoms of these disorders, as well as other variables such as emotional regulation or sensory over-reactivity. This will allow a better understanding of the appearance of such symptomatology and shed light on the prevention of the aforementioned disorders.
The principal investigator of the research project is the director of the Center for Applied Psychology of the UMH, member of the research group AITANA and member of the Interdisciplinary Research Network for the Promotion of Mental Health and Emotional Well-being in Young People (PROEM Network), José Antonio Piqueras Rodríguez; and its responsible researcher is the doctoral student of the UMH and leading member of the community of people with CRCC, Beatriz Moreno-Amador. The work team is also formed by Professor Agustín E. Martínez González of the Department of Developmental Psychology and Didactics of the UA; Professor Tíscar Rodríguez-Jiménez of the Department of Psychology of the UCAM; Professor Juan Carlos Marzo and Professor Victoria Soto-Sanz, and doctoral student Raquel Falcó, of the Department of Health Psychology of the UMH.
For further information, please contact the research team by e-mail: estudioetoc@umh.es.
