Journal of

The goal of this research was to compare the recognition of disgust between patients with severe obsessive-compulsive disorder and healthy people, and to study the relationship between the intensity of this disorder and the ability of the recognition of disgust. In this causal-comparative research, facial emotion recognition has been studied in two groups consisting of 15 normal people and 15 people with severe OCD. Facial emotion recognition was assessed by using of 41 pictures of Ekman and Friesen (1979) that evaluates 6 different emotion styles (sadness, happiness, fear, anger, disgust, surprise) and neutral emotion. The results showed that there was a significant difference between the two groups in terms of the recognition of disgust ( F=3, P=0/04).Since the situation in which OCD patients experienced disgust was different from the situations in which the normal people experienced disgust, we can consider the different perception of disgust in these individuals as one of the underlying causes of having the symptoms of OCD, specially preoccupation about the air pollution. It seems that there is a defect of the recognition of disgust only in people with severe obsessive-compulsive disorder.