Review
Copyright ©The Author(s) 2020. Published by Baishideng Publishing Group Inc. All rights reserved.
World J Psychiatr. Feb 19, 2020; 10(2): 12-20
Published online Feb 19, 2020. doi: 10.5498/wjp.v10.i2.12
Review of source-monitoring processes in obsessive-compulsive disorder
Layla Lavallé, Jérome Brunelin, Rémy Bation, Marine Mondino
Layla Lavallé, Jérome Brunelin, Rémy Bation, Marine Mondino, French National Institute of Health and Medical Research U1028, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique UMR5292, Lyon Neuroscience Research Center, Lyon 69000, France
Layla Lavallé, Jérome Brunelin, Rémy Bation, Marine Mondino, Lyon University, Lyon 69000, France
Layla Lavallé, Jérome Brunelin, Rémy Bation, Marine Mondino, Centre Hospitalier le Vinatier, Batiment 416, Bron 69678, France
Rémy Bation, Psychiatric Unit, Wertheimer Neurologic Hospital, Bron 69500, France
Author contributions: Lavallé L wrote the first draft of the manuscript; Lavallé L and Mondino M managed the systematic literature searches; Mondino M supervised the study; Brunelin J and Bation R critically revised the manuscript. All authors approved the final version of the manuscript.
Conflict-of-interest statement: There is no conflict of interest associated with any of the senior author or other coauthors contributed their efforts in this manuscript. All the Authors have no conflict of interest related to the manuscript.
Open-Access: This article is an open-access article that was selected by an in-house editor and fully peer-reviewed by external reviewers. It is distributed in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial (CC BY-NC 4.0) license, which permits others to distribute, remix, adapt, build upon this work non-commercially, and license their derivative works on different terms, provided the original work is properly cited and the use is non-commercial. See: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/
Corresponding author: Jérome Brunelin, MSc, PhD, Academic Fellow, Academic Research, Senior Researcher, Lyon Neuroscience Research Center, CH Le Vinatier, Université Claude Bernard Lyon, PSY-R2 team, Bron 69678, France. jerome.brunelin@ch-le-vinatier.fr
Received: November 5, 2019
Peer-review started: November 5, 2019
First decision: December 4, 2019
Revised: January 6, 2020
Accepted: January 13, 2020
Article in press: January 13, 2020
Published online: February 19, 2020
Abstract

Obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) is a severe mental illness characterized by persistent, intrusive and distressing obsessions and/or compulsions. Such symptoms have been conceptualized as resulting from a failure in source-monitoring processes, suggesting that patients with OCD fail to distinguish actions they perform from those they just imagine doing. In this study, we aimed to provide an updated and exhaustive review of the literature examining the relationship between source-monitoring and OCD. A systematic search in the literature through January 2019 allowed us to identify 13 relevant publications investigating source-monitoring abilities in patients with OCD or participants with subclinical compulsive symptoms. Most of the retrieved studies did not report any source-monitoring deficits in clinical and subclinical subjects compared with healthy volunteers. However, most of the studies reported that patients with OCD and subclinical subjects displayed reduced confidence in source-monitoring judgments or global cognitive confidence compared to controls. The present review highlighted some methodological and statistical limitations. Consequently, further studies are needed to explore source monitoring with regard to the subcategories of OCD symptoms (i.e., symmetry-ordering, contamination-washing, hoarding, aggressive obsession-checking, sexual-religious thoughts) and to clarify the relationship between source-monitoring subtypes (i.e., reality or internal source-monitoring) and confidence in these populations.

Keywords: Reality-monitoring, Source-monitoring, Obsessive-compulsive disorder, Subclinical compulsive symptoms

Core tip: Symptoms of obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) have been proposed as resulting from a source-monitoring failure, suggesting that patients with OCD fail to distinguish actions they perform from those they just imagine doing. This study provides an updated and exhaustive review of the literature examining the relationship between source-monitoring performances and OCD. Most of the 13 retrieved studies did not report any source-monitoring deficits but reported reduced confidence in source-monitoring judgments in patients with OCD and subclinical subjects compared to controls. Furthermore, this review highlighted some methodological limitations and provided recommendations with respect to future studies focusing on source-monitoring in OCD.