Validating the Fear of Self Questionnaire in a Spanish population (first research findings)

Here I am again, this time well and truly into 2019. I hope you had a good start to the year and that the twelve months ahead of us are as lovely as they can be.

And with the New Year comes a new article. A special one this time, as it’s dedicated to the first paper published from my PhD research. Fresh out of the oven, as they say: the manuscript first appeared online on 21 December and the paper has now been officially published. It’s in English and appears in the Journal of Obsessive-Compulsive and Related Disorders. I’ll try to give you a short summary of the key points, but if you’d like to have a look at the original paper, here’s the link:

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2211364918301143

Our study had two main aims:

1. To validate the Fear of Self Questionnaire (FSQ) for the Spanish population.
2. To investigate to what extent this factor predicts OCD belief domains (overestimation of danger, overestimation of threat, importance of thoughts…) and OCD symptoms.

As a quick reminder, in a couple of lines: the feared self means that the person with OCD trusts in, and invests more time and energy in, the kind of person they’re afraid of becoming than the kind of person they really are. According to the inference-based model, this distorted perception of one’s own identity would be one of the factors behind the onset of the disorder. In other words, the feared self would be an essential factor to consider in the development and maintenance of OCD. The idea is that a patient has obsessions with one particular content and not another because those obsessions are directly linked to the characteristics of that specific patient’s feared self (being a bad person, being aggressive, an immoral person, someone who easily catches infections, a lazy person, a scatterbrain…).

Well, the questionnaire used to measure the feared self was only available in English and Italian. In practical terms, this meant that until now only patients whose first language was one of those (or who were very fluent in one) could benefit from this tool. On a more official level, the FSQ couldn’t be used with Spanish populations (for studies, research, use in the public health system…), so we had no tool to measure this factor, which could prove essential to understanding and treating OCD. Until today. The paper I’m presenting confirms the validity and excellent psychometric properties of the Spanish version of the Fear of Self Questionnaire, which means it can now be officially used with Spanish populations.

As for the study’s second aim, investigating to what extent the feared self predicts OCD belief domains and symptoms… The results appear to support our hypothesis: the feared self is significantly associated with OCD symptoms, particularly with repugnant obsessions (sexual, aggressive, moral). This matters because, if further research (including the study I’m currently working on) shows that the feared self is indeed a factor in the onset and maintenance of OCD, as the inference-based model suggests, then current therapies would need to be complemented with strategies aimed at treating this aspect, something today’s OCD-specific cognitive behavioural treatments lack.

And this is the first paper of what I hope will be a long list, since the research covers several topics, all of them important (well, I would say that!). In any case, the most interesting part is yet to come, as the part of the study with a clinical population hasn’t been published yet. When it is, as I promised each of the participants, everything will be published here, in the hope that more than one of you will find it a useful read.