Obsessive Compulsive Disorder

Professor Keith Laws and Naomi Fineberg's work is in collaboration with the only national OCD centre in the UK. This research has centred upon identifying a common cognitive endophenotype profile in people with a range of OCD-related disorders. They have published multiple papers showing that a common set-shifting problem exists in people diagnosed with OCD, Body Dysmorphic Disorder, trichotillomania and even in healthy individuals who meet criteria for having an Obsessive Compulsive Personality (they are perfectionists). Additionally, they demonstrated for the first time, that people with body dysmorphic disorder show exceptional face identity recognition skills (far better than the healthy population) – and this is largely because they identify faces by focussing on specific features rather than in a holistic manner as occurs in the vast majority of the general population.