Jennifer from the aocdf attended an Emotional Contamination support group at the International OCD Foundation Conference in Austin Texas in July 2019. She kept in contact with a couple people from the group, including Ana.
Ana is now doing her undergraduate psychology research project/thesis on contagion-related magical thinking, contact contamination, mental contamination, and their relationships to psychopathology (e.g. mental disorders).
Though there has been an abundance of research into the concept of contamination and its relation to psychopathology, there have been few and inconsistent theoretical writings on the similarity between contamination and contagion-related magical thinking. Additionally, a recent theory in psychological nosology has proposed the existence of a single, continuous spectrum of severity on which all psychopathologies and discreet diagnoses fall. Given this, the project propose a general factor of magical contagion (encompassing both contamination fears and contagion-related magical thinking) that is correlated with this spectrum such that any degree of psychopathology will predict levels of sensitivity to magical contagion.
Ana hopes this research can help bridge a gap in OCD research between the concepts of traditional contamination and contagion-related magical thinking.
Ana is looking to get a wide variety of participants (you) to take an online survey to gather data for this study. Anyone over 18 is eligible. It only takes about 15-20 minutes and you have a 1/25 chance of winning an Amazon gift card by participating! 😄
If you are interested in participating in this study, please e mail Ana at abogdanovich@hillsdale.edu.
Data collection ends November 10 2019.
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