Decision-making in Hoarding Disorder

• Applicants: Professorin Dr. Cornelia Exner; Dr. Jana Hansmeier
• Subject Area: Personality Psychology, Clinical and Medical Psychology, Methodology
• Term: since 2024
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 551279462

Hoarding disorder (HD) is characterized by a strong need to save possessions, even if they are not of monetary value or high utility. Therapy programs that have proven to be effective for obsessive-compulsive disorder only achieve inadequate treatment success in HD. In order to develop treatment strategies specifically tailored to HD, a better understanding of its underlying mechanisms is necessary. First studies suggest that the emotional experience of regret in decisions may play a role in HD and may particularly come into effect in decisions about objects. An emotional attachment to possessions (object attachment) might influence this experience in decision-making about objects and could be promoted through the integration of objects into the self-concept. An aberrant experience of regret in HD could be explained by deficits in emotion regulation. Previous studies have the weaknesses that 1) relevant factors were often only considered individually, 2) abnormalities were not investigated in a comparison between neutral and disorder-specific contexts, and 3) the effects of object attachment on decisions were not examined in HD. Based on these gaps, the planned project examines the experience of regret with a neutral and a newly developed and validated HD-specific decision-making task about objects. Prior to the HD-specific task, object attachment is manipulated in a within-subjects design with a validated manipulation condition and a neutral condition. A newly developed and validated questionnaire measures the integration of objects into the self-concept. Individuals with HD are compared in their experiences with healthy control subjects and a clinical comparison group of depressed participants. The aim of the project is to investigate 1) whether HD individuals show higher levels of regret in both decision-making tasks compared to the comparison groups, 2) whether regret is further increased in the HD-specific task among the HD individuals, 3) whether a prior manipulation of object attachment increases the emotional experience in the HD-specific task compared to a neutral condition without manipulation, 4) whether this effect is particularly pronounced in HD individuals compared to the comparison groups, 5) whether emotion regulation deficits explain the abnormalities in the experience of regret in HD individuals, 6) whether an integration of objects into the self-concept moderates the object attachment developed in HD individuals. This project makes it possible to link various explanatory approaches and uses newly developed methods and questionnaires. The results obtained by this project provide insights into the disorder-specific relevance of the investigated factors and their manifestation in specific contexts. The findings can provide starting points for the further development of therapies that have so far only been associated with low effectiveness in HD.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants