Gideon E Anholt

• PhD
• Associate professor at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev

Introduction Emotion regulation is essential for psychological well-being. One strategy that is commonly researched is reappraisal. Individual differences regarding the tendency to use reappraisal, as well as its implications for affective experience, were extensively studied. In recent years, interest has emerged in the choice to use reappraisal,...

Objective: Obsessive-compulsive disorder is characterized by a chronic course that can vary between patients. The knowledge on the naturalistic long-term outcome of obsessive-compulsive disorder and its predictors is surprisingly limited. The present research was designed to identify clinical and psychosocial predictors of the long-term outcome of...

Background: Recent studies have focused on stimuli characteristics that influence emotion regulation choice. A consistent finding concerns the relation between emotional intensity and the choice between reappraisal and distraction. Moreover, reappraisal affordances were found to influence emotion regulation choice. However, none of the studies asse...

Self-criticism constitutes an important risk factor to psychopathology. However, it has never been investigated in the context of health anxiety. The authors examined the role of self-criticism in health anxiety in Arab and Israeli young adults, while controlling for known predictors of health anxiety -- anxiety sensitivity, depression, major and m...

Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD) is a leading cause of disability world-wide (World Health Organization, 2008). Treatment of OCD is a specialized field whose aim is recovery from illness for as many patients as possible. The evidence-based psychotherapeutic treatment for OCD is specialized cognitive behavior therapy (CBT, NICE, 2005, Koran and S...

Obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) symptoms fluctuate throughout the day, but scientists are not sure what underlies these fluctuations. One factor which may explain how OCD symptoms wax and wane throughout the day is alertness. Increased alertness is associated with greater inhibitory control, a factor which plays a significant role in patients’...

Response inhibition, whether reactive or proactive, is mostly investigated in a narrow cognitive framework. We argue that it be viewed within a broader frame than the action being inhibited, i.e., in the context of emotion and motivation of the individual at large. This is particularly important in the clinical domain, where the motivational streng...

Objectives: Obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) is a debilitating psychiatric disorder, often complicated with comorbidities. Social phobia (SP) is the most frequent co-occurring anxiety disorder in OCD, associated with increased clinical severity. However, no study had examined the relevance of interpersonal processes in this comorbidity, which a...

Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD) is a leading cause of disability world-wide (World Health Organization, 2008). Treatment of OCD is a specialized field whose aim is recovery from illnessfor as many patients as possible. The evidence-based psychotherapeutic treatment for OCD is specialized cognitive behavior therapy (CBT, NICE, 2005, Koran and Si...

Deficient inhibitory control and difficulty resolving uncertainty are central in psychopathology. How these factors interact remains unclear. Initial evidence suggests that inducing inhibitory control improves resolution of uncertainty. This may occur only when participants overcome action tendencies, which are dominant tendencies to perform certai...

Background Obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) is characterized by recurrent, intrusive thoughts and/or behaviors. OCD symptoms are often triggered by external stimuli. Therefore, it has been suggested that difficulty inhibiting responses to stimuli associated with strong action tendencies may underlie symptoms. The present electrophysiological stu...

Compulsive checking is the most common ritual among individuals with obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). Yet, other than uncertainty, the variables prompting checking are not fully understood. Laboratory studies suggest that task conditions - whether threatening (anxiety-relevant) or neutral, and task type - whether requiring perceptual or reasoni...

Introduction: Obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD) is a chronic psychiatric disorder where most patients do not reach full symptomatic remission. Identifying predictors of course can improve patients' care by informing clinicians on prognosis and enhancing treatment strategies. Several predictors associated with improved outcome of OCD were identif...

Although effective treatments for obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD) are increasingly available, a considerable percentage of patients fails to respond or relapses. Predictors associated with improved outcome of OCD were identified. However, information on interpersonal determinants is lacking. This study investigated the contribution of attachmen...

Objective: A growing body of research has shown that mere expression of affective words (affect labeling) can help dampen emotional responses, as reflected by these words. Previous studies revealed that affect labeling can reduce physiological anxiety responses of subjects suffering from anxiety disorders. In addition, multiple studies have shown...

Background Obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) is characterized by persistent, intrusive, and distressing obsessions and/or compulsions and is associated with marked impairments in quality of life. The goal of the present study was to examine initial stages of information processing, specifically, perceptual and attention orientation phases that pr...

Emotional picture databases are commonly used in emotion research. The databases were first based on ratings of emotional dimensions, and the interest in studying discrete emotions led to the categorization of subsets from these databases to emotional categories. However, to-date, studies that categorized affective pictures used confidence interval...

Obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD) is associated with a moderate degree of underperformance on cognitive tests, including deficient processing speed. However, despite little research focusing on Intelligence Quotient (IQ) in OCD, it has long been speculated that the disorder is associated with elevated intellectual capacity. The present meta-analy...

The current study set out to investigate trait versus state views regarding inhibitory deficits in participants scoring high and low on contamination fear. Furthermore, it was investigated whether inhibitory deficits are specific for contamination-related stimuli. Participants were selected on high (n = 40) vs. low (n = 44) contamination fear and s...

Background: The cognitive theory of obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) ascertains that catastrophic (mis)interpretations of normally occurring intrusive thoughts are related to the maintenance of OCD. Nonetheless, findings supporting the relationship between cognitive biases and OCD symptoms are largely inconsistent. In the present study we exami...

Background: Depression is the most common comorbidity in obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). However, the mechanisms of depressive comorbidity in OCD are poorly understood. We assessed the directionality and moderators of the OCD-depression association over time in a large, prospective clinical sample of OCD patients. Methods: Data were drawn f...

Introduction Obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) is described as a chronic condition. However, relatively little is known about predictors affecting its long-term outcome. Objective To examine the contribution of clinical and interpersonal determinants in predicting remission status of 254 OCD patients at one-year follow-up (FU1). Methods We used...

Abstract Previous research has suggested that a deficit in working memory might underlie the difficulty of obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) patients to control their thoughts and actions. However, a recent meta-analyses found only small effect sizes for working memory deficits in OCD. Recently, a distinction has been made between declarative and...

Obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) is characterized by repeated thoughts and behaviors. This study explored the stages of motor response preparation that precede action performance or inhibition: We investigated whether OCD is related to enhanced action tendencies in response to external stimuli. Response preparation processes were assessed using...

Task control is an executive control mechanism that facilitates goal-directed task selection by suppressing irrelevant automatic “stimulus-driven” behaviors. In the current study, we test the hypothesis that less efficient task control in individuals diagnosed with obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) is associated with OCD symptoms, and specificall...

Background: Numerous studies have investigated response inhibition (RI) in obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), with many reporting that OCD patients demonstrate deficits in RI as compared to controls. However, reported effect sizes tend to be modest and results have been inconsistent, with some studies finding intact RI in OCD. To date, no study...

Obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) is characterized by repeated thoughts and behaviors. Several studies have detected deficient response inhibition ability in individuals with OCD, leading researchers to suggest this deficit as an endophenotype of OCD. However, other researchers maintain that the effect size of this deficit is modest and that it l...

Background: Patients with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) exhibit increased reaction time (RT) variability. This finding is consistent across various choice RT tasks and is considered a core ADHD phenotype, often interpreted as expressing occasional attention lapses. This study explores the selective contribution of perceptual and...

A model that suggests reconsolidation of traumatic memories as a mechanism of change in therapy is important, but problematic to generalize to disorders other than post-traumatic and acute-stress disorder. We suggest that a more plausible mechanism of change in psychotherapy is acquisition of adaptive emotion regulation strategies. How to Cite Thi...

Background and objectives: Cognitive accounts suggest that information processing biases have an important role in the etiology and maintenance of social anxiety (SA). Empirical evidence support this notion has been established in variety of cognitive domains. Yet, it is still not known how social anxious individuals process emotional content in wo...

Background: Repeated checking is a common ritual in obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). van den Hout and Kindt (2003b) devised a task demonstrating paradoxical reductions in memory confidence following repeated checking. This effect was later found to be contingent upon response inhibition. The current study aims to (1) test an alternative interp...

Obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) is an anxiety disorder characterized by repeated thoughts and behaviors. Inhibitory deficits are presumably related to the onset and maintenance of this disorder. The present study investigated whether obsessive-compulsive (OC) symptoms are related to enhanced response tendencies in reaction to external stimuli....

Emotions are important and basic in human experience, and are comprised of different components, such as subjective feelings, cognitive appraisal, physiological response and action tendencies (Kleinginna and Kleinginna, 1981). Emotions become dysfunctional when they interfere with one's ability to behave adaptively, and therefore successful emotion...

Cognitive theories of obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) ascertain that catastrophic (mis)interpretations of normally occurring intrusive thoughts are causal to the onset and maintenance of OCD. However, we suggest that various research findings challenge basic premises of the cognitive theory. Furthermore, results of clinical trials investigating...

Cognitive theories of obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) ascertain that catastrophic (mis)interpretations of normally occurring intrusive thoughts are causal to the onset and maintenance of OCD. Recently, Calkins, Berman and Wilhelm have highlighted research validating the cognitive model. However, the current comment article stresses various find...

Past research demonstrated that age at onset might account for different clinical and etiological characteristics in panic disorder (PD). However, prior research relied on arbitrary choices of age cut-offs. Using a data-driven validated method, this study aimed to examine differences between early and late onset PD in various determinants. Admixtur...

Background: Research into age of onset in obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) has indicated significant differences between patients with early and late onset of the disorder. However, multiple criteria have been used arbitrarily for differentiating between early- and late-onset OCD, rendering inconsistent results that are difficult to interpret....

Obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD) is characterized by intrusive and anxiety evoking thoughts followed by repetitive behaviors (compulsions). Accumulative evidence revealed neuropsychological deficits in executive functions, especially in inhibitory mechanisms, in OCD patients. The connection between inhibitory control and the onset and maintenanc...

Background and objectives: Obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) is an anxiety disorder characterized by compulsions aimed at reducing anxiety associated with intrusive cognitions. However, compulsive behaviors such as repeated checking were found to increase rather than decrease uncertainty related to obsessive thoughts (e.g., whether the gas stove...

Social anxiety occurs in a range of social situations, the salience of which is influenced by prevailing modes of social contact. The emergence of computer mediated communication (CMC), buoyed by the recent explosion of social networks, has changed the way many people make and maintain social contacts. We randomly assigned 30 socially anxious and 3...

Cognitive behavior accounts of obsessive-compulsive disorder ascertain that the catastrophic interpretation of (normally occurring) intrusive thoughts as a sign of danger plays a major role in the etiology and maintenance of OCD. Various researchers have placed particular importance on metacognitive beliefs such as thought importance and control of...

The present study examined sudden gains during treatment for obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) and their relationship to short- and long-term outcome. Ninety-one individuals (age 19-64) completed either cognitive treatment, exposure treatment, or their combination with fluvoxamine for OCD. Participants' obsessive-compulsive symptoms were assessed...

Many OCD patients present with comorbid conditions, and major depression is one of the most frequent comorbidities observed. OCD patients with comorbid depression exhibit functional disability and poor quality of life. However, it is unclear whether depressive symptoms are predictive of treatment response, and debate remains whether they should be...

To examine characteristics of drop-outs from treatment for obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), we studied 121 participants who underwent exposure or cognitive treatment, either alone or with fluvoxamine. OCD symptoms were assessed at pre-treatment, post-treatment, and at every session. No differences in attrition were found between treatment condi...

The Yale Brown Obsessive-Compulsive scale (Y-BOCS) is a semi-structured interview considered to be the gold standard in the measurement of obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) severity, yet findings about its factorial structure are conflicting. This study aimed at comparing different models, and testing whether factorial structure differs along var...

In obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), the relationship between autism spectrum disorders (ASD), attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) symptom, and obsessive-compulsive (OC) symptom dimensions and severity has scarcely been studied. Therefore, 109 adult outpatients with primary OCD were compared to 87 healthy controls on OC, ADHD and ASD...

Backgrond Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) symptoms and attention deficit/ hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) symptoms are frequently comorbid with obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). However, limited research exists with respect to the relations between these symptoms, and their impact on OC symptom severity. Method 109 outpatients with primary OCD and...

The Obsessive–Compulsive Beliefs Questionnaire‐87 (OBQ‐87) has been constructed by leading obsessive–compulsive disorder (OCD) experts to assess dysfunctional beliefs typical for OCD patients. The OBQ‐87 has recently been revised (Obsessive–Compulsive Beliefs Questionnaire‐44 [OBQ‐44]) to improve its psychometric properties. The current investigati...

Although the Yale-Brown Obsessive Compulsive Scale (Y-BOCS) and the Padua Inventory-Revised (PI-R) are the most widely used instruments for assessing presence and severity of symptoms in obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), the correlation between the two instruments is surprisingly low. The aim of the present investigation was to test two possible...

Behavior therapy [exposure and response prevention (ERP)] and cognitive therapy (CT) have proven effective in the treatment of obsessive-compulsive disorder. Direct comparisons between these treatment modalities have exposed no differences in efficacy. However, very little research has been conducted into the differences between the change processe...

Unlabelled: There is considerable overlap in symptomatology between Tourette's syndrome (TS) and obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). Increased rates of tics are found in OCD and up to 60% obsessive-compulsive symptoms in TS. However, in OCD obsessive-compulsive symptoms are more often anxiety-related and, as a consequence, aimed at anxiety-reduct...

The obsessive-compulsive spectrum disorder (OCSD) theory postulates that a wide range of disorders is closely related to OCD. Current cognitive models ascertain that certain beliefs leading to misinterpretation of the significance of intrusions are important in the etiology and maintenance of OCD. This study examined whether pathological gambling,...