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Objective: Fear of moral guilt and conseque:nt increased attention to personal actions and intentions are the main ingredients of the self-criticism in patients suffering from obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). This pathogenic attitude takes shape in a typical guilt-inducing self-talk. The purpose of this work is to describe in detail a novel cognitive therapeutic procedure for OCD called "Dramatized Socratic Dialogue" (DSD). Method: DSD is a theory-oriented intervention that combine elements of Socratic dialogue, chairwork, and cognitive acceptance strategies derived from Mancini's model, which posits that obsessive-compulsive (OC) symptoms stem from a fear of deontological guilt. Results: DSD appears to have many strengths, being a theory-oriented treatment and focusing, as a therapeutic target, on the cognitive structures that determine pathogenic processes and OC symptoms. Furthermore, it is a short, flexible and tailormade intervention. Conclusions: Detailed description of the intervention could foster future research perspectives and thus be used in evidence-based effectiveness studies to establish whether DSD reduces OC symptoms and to investigate its mechanism of action. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objective: The close link between obsessive symptomatology, guilt and inflated responsibility is well documented, although one might suppose that guilt sensitiveness and dysfunctional beliefs about responsibility are rooted further in time. Imagery with rescripting (IWR) is an emotion-focused technique that binds actual stressful emotions to past memories where similar feelings were activated. It is used to change the meaning of emotionally distressing memories, turning aversive mental images into positive ones, and achieving a healthier prospective on the event. the aim of this study was to compare the content of IWR exercises, collected during an on-going cognitive-behavioral psychotherapy, in OCD and non-OCD patients, in order to explore eventual differences in their early negative childhood memories. We expected guilt and blame-related childhood episodes to be more frequent in OCD, compared against non-OCD patients. Method: forty-one imagery exercises were collected and categorized according to their content, emotions, needs, type of re-scripting, and final cognitive re-attribution. Results: OCD patients reported significantly more blame/reproach memories, expressing more guilt emotion and needs for acceptance. Within the re-scripting phase, all patients, regardless of their diagnosis, concluded the exercise protecting, reassuring and fostering emotional and needs expression, with no specific difference between groups. Conclusions: this work has several limitations, including the subjective nature of the study, the small sample size and unbalanced gender distribution across samples. However, our findings are in line with cognitive models on OCD, supporting the role of guilt-related early experiences that seem to be specific to this disorder. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objective: Much research and theorizing suggest that compulsive acquisition is a central component of hoarding disease. The Compulsive Acquisition Scale (CAS; Frost et al. 2002) is a self-rating scale measuring the extent to which individuals acquire and feel compelled to acquire possessions. The present study aimed to evaluate the psychometric properties of the CAS, in terms of reliability and construct validity. Method: The scale was administered to a sample of 491 non-clinical adults along with a battery of selected selfreport measures. Participants were randomly divided into two subsamples. Both exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses were performed. Support for construct validity was provided by correlations between CAS and the other administered measures. Results: Unlike the originally suggested 2-factor structure, both exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses revealed an underlying 3-factor structure (Emotions, Time and Money, and Free Stuff). Our outcomes showed good subscales homogeneity; support for concurrent validity was provided by significantly positively correlations between CAS scores and the other measures of hoarding severity; convergent validity was gathered examining correlations between CAS and measures of depression, anxiety, and obsessive compulsive disorder. Conclusions: Overall, empirical results indicated promising psychometric properties of the CAS Italian version in a nonclinical sample. Limitations of the study and the need for further research are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]