Joseph N. Ricciardi

The Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) Hairpulling Scale: 1. Development and Factor Analyses

We developed the MGH Hairpulling Scale to provide a brief, self-report instrument for assessing repetitive hairpulling. Seven individual items, rated for severity from 0 to 4, assess urges to pull, actual pulling, perceived control, and associated distress. We administered the scale to 119 consecutive patients with chronic hairpulling. Statistical analyses indicate that the seven items form a homogenous scale for the measurement of severity in this disorder.

The Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) Hairpulling Scale: 2. Reliability and Validity

Assessment of symptom severity and change in chronic hairpulling has been limited by the absence of a psychometrically validated clinical rating scale. The Massachusetts General Hospital Hairpulling Scale demonstrated test-retest reliability, convergent and divergent validity, and sensitivity to change in hairpulling symptoms.

Depressed mood is related to obsessions, but not to compulsions, in obsessive-compulsive disorder

The authors compared obsessive-compulsive symptoms in 150 patients with obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) who had never experienced a mood disorder, who had once experienced a mood disorder, and who had a current mood disorder. All patients were administered the Structured Clinical Interview for DSM-III-R, the Yale-Brown Obsessive-Compulsive Scale, and the Beck Depression Inventory. Patients with comorbid mood disorder showed more severe obsessional symptoms, but not more severe compulsive symptoms, than did patients without mood disorder. In patients free of mood disorder, severity of subclinical dysphoria was correlated with severity of obsessions as well, but not with severity of compulsions. That is, mood disorders seem selectively associated with worsening of obsessions.

Suppression of Negative and Neutral Thoughts

Testing a variant of Wegners (1989) “thought suppression” paradigm, we had subjects identify a personally-relevant negative thought that had been troubling them recently. Subjects were then randomly assigned either to a negative target thought group or to a neutral target thought (“white bear”) group, and randomly assigned either to an initial suppression condition (followed by a free expression period) or an initial free expression condition (followed by a suppression period). The results revealed that subjects in the neutral thought group experienced a decline in thoughts about white bears throughout the course of the experiment, whereas subjects asked first to suppress a personally relevant negative thought experienced nearly a three-fold increase in its frequency of occurrence when later given permission to express it. These findings suggest that negatively valent thoughts may respond differently than neutral thoughts following attempts to suppress them.