Review of Research Paradigms for Response Inhibition in Obsessive Compulsive Disorder

Each of the most commonly used four research paradigms for OCD response inhibition(Go-Nogo, Stroop, Stop Signal and Negative Priming Task)has its pros and cons. The Go-Nogo paradigm has relatively simpler tasks and the conclusions it produces can in some degree explain the response inhibition, yet the experimental materials used are much too simple and most of them are irrelevant to OCD, so the ecological validity is rather low; compared with the Go-Nogo paradigm, the Stroop paradigm uses richer experimental materials like words of emotion, besides the use of words of color, thus the ecological validity is enhanced. That's why most of the current OCD response inhibition researches adopt the Stroop paradigm; the Stop Signal paradigm, to some degree, is similar to the Go-Nogo paradigm, yet it still has made some improvements on it, so it not only possesses the advantages of Go-Nogo paradigm, but also has a richer indices of reference; the Negative Priming Task paradigm is the least commonly used research paradigm of the four, whose advantage lies in that it can set different time intervals thus to enhance the flexibility of the experiments. Through the analysis and summary of the previous researches, an outlook of the future research orientations and trend is done concerning the OCD inhibition deficiency.