ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Psychol.
Sec. Psychology for Clinical Settings
Implicit and Explicit Sense of Agency in Obsessive-Compulsive Tendencies
Provisionally accepted
- 1University Hospital Jena, Jena, Germany
- 2Circuits Underlying Mental Health (C-I-R-C), Jena-Magdeburg-Halle, Germany
- 3German Center for Mental Health (DZPG), Partner Site Jena, Jena, Germany
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The sense of agency (SoA), or the perception of control over one's actions and their outcomes, has been proposed to be attenuated in individuals with OCD and obsessive-compulsive (OC) tendencies. This study investigated the relationship between SoA and OC tendencies in 29 healthy participants using the temporal binding task. Based on the Sense of Agency and Seeking Proxies for Internal states (SPIS) model, we hypothesized that individuals with high OC tendencies (HOC) would exhibit diminished tone binding but heightened action binding compared to individuals with lower OC tendencies (LOC). Our results confirmed significant action and tone binding effects across the entire sample, suggesting a robust implicit SoA. However, contrary to our hypotheses, no significant differences in action or tone binding effects were found between HOC and LOC groups, suggesting a preserved implicit SoA in individuals with higher OC tendencies. Regression analyses revealed that trait anxiety, rather than OC symptom severity, significantly predicted tone binding in the whole sample, indicating an attenuated SoA with increasing trait anxiety levels. Further, within the HOC group, OC symptom severity significantly predicted tone binding, challenging the SPIS model's assumption that individuals with high OC tendencies would exhibit diminished tone binding effects. Despite preserved implicit SoA, explicit measures revealed significant group differences, with HOC individuals reporting a lower global SoA. This dissociation between implicit and explicit SoA suggests that self-reported agency may reflect cognitive biases or compensatory control mechanisms rather than fundamental impairments in action-outcome processing. Our findings underscore the need for further research in clinical OCD populations to disentangle the effects of OC symptom severity and subtype on SoA. These insights contribute to a nuanced understanding of agency distortions in compulsive behavior.
Keywords: Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder, sense of agency, Temporal binding, sensorimotortheory, Anxiety
Received: 11 Jul 2025; Accepted: 14 Nov 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Schmidt and Wagner. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Stefan Schmidt, stefan.schmidt@uni-jena.de
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