Threatened Morality, Physical Cleansing and Reinforcement-Learning

Patients with OCD, GAD, and healthy-controls completed the “threatened morality” manipulation (to induce guilt) followed by the two-steps-reinforcement-learning task. We found that threatened morality leads all participants to use a model-free, rather than a model-based, strategy. However, brief hand-washing eliminated this effect for most participants but not for GAD patients.