An Anxious Moment Makes People Clean Obsessively

Whether you're a person biting her nails during a phone interview or a polar bear pacing its cage, anxious animals often do the same thing over and over. Extreme cases of repetitive behavior show up in people with obsessive-compulsive disorder or autism. Now researchers have shown that even a simple, anxiety-inducing experiment can make an average person act in a repetitive and ritualized way. "A lot of social theorists have talked about the link between anxiety and ritualization," says Martin Lang, a graduate student at the University of Connecticut. However, "There were, to our knowledge, no experimental studies with humans that clearly demonstrated this link." So Lang and his coauthors turned to psychology's most popular subjects: university students. And to inspire dread in those students, the researchers used a popular fear: public speaking. The subjects were 62 students from Masaryk University in the Czech Republic, male and female, with an ...