Incompleteness and harm avoidance in OCD, anxiety and depressive disorders, and non-clinical controls

Abstract This study examined two main tenets of the Summerfeldt, Kloosterman, Antony, Richter, and Swinson (2004) model which posits incompleteness (INC) and harm avoidance (HA) as motivational core dimensions of obsessive–compulsive disorder (OCD): (1) INC is OCD-specific. (2) HA is common to OCD and other anxiety disorders. For this purpose, we assessed levels of INC and HA in 170 OCD patients, 38 anxiety, 45 depressive and 220 non-clinical controls. INC severity was more pronounced in OCD than in anxiety disorder, depressive disorder and non-clinical controls. HA was more pronounced in the OCD sample than in depressive disorder and non-clinical controls, and more pronounced in anxiety patients than in non-clinical controls, while HA severity did not differ significantly between OCD and anxiety disorders and between anxiety and depressive disorders. Moreover, regression analyses indicated (a) that the diagnosis of OCD and – to a much lesser degree – the diagnosis of a depressive disorder independently contributed to INC severity, whereas the diagnosis of an anxiety disorder did not, and (b) that OCD as well as anxiety disorder diagnoses, but also depressive disorder diagnoses (although to a lesser extent) independently contributed to HA severity. In sum, our results yielded preponderant, but only partial support for the Summerfeldt model.