Increased Tactile Sensitivity and Deficient Feed-Forward Inhibition in Pathological Hair Pulling and Skin Picking
Behaviour Research and Therapy 120 (2019) 103433 Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Behaviour Research and Therapy journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/brat Increased tactile sensitivity and deficient feed-forward inhibition in pathological hair pulling and skin picking T ∗ David C. Houghtona,b, , Mark Tommerdahlc, Douglas W. Woodsb,d a Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, Medical University of South Carolina, Charleston, SC, 29425, USA b Psychological & Brain Sciences Department, Texas A&M University, College Station, TX, 77843, USA c Department of Biomedical Engineering, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, NC, 27599, USA d Department of Psychology, Marquette University, Milwaukee, WI, 53233, USA ARTICLE INFO ABSTRACT Keywords: An increasing body of evidence has linked pathological body-focused repetitive behaviors (BFRBs) to excessive Trichotillomania sensory sensitivity and difficulty modulating sensory inputs. Likewise, neurobiological evidence points to deficits Excoriation disorder in feed-forward inhibition and sensory habituation in conditions with similar symptomatology. There is cur- Psychophysics rently little evidence regarding potential physiological sensory abnormalities in BFRBs. The current study Sensation compared 46 adults with pathological hair pulling and/or skin picking to 46 age-matched healthy control participants on a series of self-report measures and objective psychophysical tests of neurophysiological sensory functions. Persons in the BFRB group reported increased scores on the Sensory Gating Inventory (U=320.50, p < .001) and all of its subscales (all p-values < .001), reflecting abnormal sensory experiences. The BFRB 2 group also showed decreased tactile thresholds (increased sensitivity) (F[1, 76] = 10.65, p = .002, ηp = .12) 2 and deficient feed-forward inhibition (F[1, 76] = 5.18, p = .026, ηp = .064), but no abnormalities in quickly- adapting sensory habituation were detected on an amplitude discrimination task.
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