Assisi day 1

Friday report from Assisi, Italy
The first meeting day was a success. The morning started with prof. Dar (who has been interviewed by the rucklab previously on his interesting article of external proxies) with the presentation ”The relationship between sensory processing, childhood rituals and obsessive-compulsive symptoms”. Prof. Dar and his research group have found that there is a strong relationship between sensory sensitivity, childhood ritualism and adult OCD symptoms. It is therefore possible that the need for control in OCD may rely on deficient sensory integration.
The second presentation was by Amelia Gangemi who tested whether OCD patients use prudential reasoning strategies i.e. systematic confirmation of the danger hypothesis and disconfirmation of the safety one. The experimental study indeed showed that OCD patients adopt a prudential reasoning strategy, which focuses on the danger, and lead the patients to search for catastrophic confirmations.
Kitty Dahl gave a presentation of the impressive Norwegian political step of implementation of CBT for OCD in Norway.
Francesco Mancini presented an interesting multiple baseline study of four OCD patients with the aim to use acceptance strategies regarding guilt and responsibility. The results showed impressive reductions on OCD symptoms using these strategies.
The last presentation before a wonderful lunch (with some great Italian wine) was by Gioia Bottesi who gave a lecture on her study regarding the contribution of intolerance of uncertainty, not just right experiences and behavioural inhibition on OCD symptoms. Gioia and her research group used an advanced experimental setting and their conclusions were that intolerance of uncertainty could possibly mediate the relationship between impaired response inhibition, not just right experiences and OCD symptoms.

The afternoon consisted of Barbara Basile who reported some really interesting fMRI data showing that OCD patients had reduced activation in the anterior cingulate cortex when experiencing guilt.
Rucklab’s Erik Andersson then presented  our data on Internet-based CBT for OCD. The presentation went great according to a possibly biased observer.
The afternoon ended with an interesting presentation by Gabriele Melli on the Italian psychometric properties of the new Dimensional Obsessive-Compulsive Scale (DOCS), which was originally developed by Rucklab’s friend Jonathan Abramowitz and his colleagues. The conclusions were that the DOCS holds nice and promising properties to assess and diagnose OCD patients. The DOCS has also been translated to Swedish by the Rucklab crew. Please email us if you need a copy.

Ciao

More updates tomorrow