For the 2016 Annual OCD Conference

1. Material Scrupulosity in
Hoarding
Randy O. Frost, Sophia Deady. Greta Guevara,
Kathryn Dernbach, Maggie Peebles-Dorin
Smith College
Symposium on Research Advances in Hoarding

2. Cognitive Behavioral Model of
Hoarding
• Core Beliefs & Vulnerabilities
• Information Processing Deficits
• Emotional Attachments & Beliefs about
Possessions
• Learning Properties

3. Cognitive Behavioral Model of
Hoarding
• Core Beliefs & Vulnerabilities
• Information Processing Deficits
• Emotional Attachments & Beliefs about
Possessions
• Learning Properties

4. Emotional Attachments & Beliefs
about Possessions
• Sentimental -- Emotional Attachments
• Instrumental – Usefulness
• Intrinsic – Aesthetic sensitivity

5. The Meaning of Possessions:
instrumental value
• Anecdotal Accounts
– Harm
– Good home
– Fear of Waste
• Frost et al., 2015
• Dozier & Ayers, 2014

6. “I hate to put them in the trash. I know it’s stupid,
but 99% of the glove is still usable! It seems like
such a waste. I’ve read articles about how wasteful
the average American is, and here is this perfectly
good fabric that I’m wasting”
~Frost & Steketee, 2010; 148-149).
Listening to what people tell us

7. Listening to what people tell us
• I feel a sense of duty to my possessions.
• I feel guilty for things I have wasted.
• I feel urges to rescue things from being wasted or
destroyed.
• I feel like a bad person when I waste things.
• I worry about how objects feel when I throw them
away.

8. OCD Scrupulosity
• “fearing sin where there is none”
Abramowitz & Jacoby (2014)

9. Material Scrupulosity
Exaggerated sense of duty or moral/ethical responsibility
for the care and disposition of possessions to prevent
them from being harmed or wasted.
Violation of this duty is difficult to imagine and would
result in guilt and a sense of personal failure
GUILT
GUILT GUILT
GUILT

10. Material Scrupulosity & Hoarding
• Study 1 – (n = 149)
– Development of Measure of Material Scrupulosity (MOMS)
• 30 items
– Correlation with Penn Inventory of Scrupulosity – Revised
– Correlation with Hoarding (SI-R)
– Correlations with OCD (OCI-R)
• Study 2 – (n = 27)
– Examination of MOMS in a clinical sample
– Correlation with SI-R

11. Correlations with MOMS & PIOS-sin
MOMS PIOS-Sin
SI-R tot .61* .36*
SI-R acq .43* .34*
SI-R dd .70* .33*
SI-R cl .41* .26*
MOMS PIOS-sin
SI-R tot .45* .22
SI-R acq .34 .33
SI-R dd .54* .26
SI-R cl .34 .07
Study 1; n=149
X = 38.0 (20.7)
Study 2; n=27
X = 68.5 (29.9)

12. Study 1: Correlations with Depression
and OCI-R Subscales
MOMS PIOS sin
Depression .33* .30*
Checking .50* .29*
Neutralizing .41* .12
Obsessing .45* .53*
Ordering .35* .20*
Washing .25* .13
OCI –R total minus H .54* .38*
* p < .05

13. Study 1: Predicting Hoarding
standardized Betas
Predictor SI-R acq SI-R dd SI-R cl
Depression .043 .065 .214*
PIOS-sin .179* .118 .109
OCI-R .231* -012 .119
MOMS .230* .645** .232*
* p < .05
** p .001

14. Reactions to violating material
scrupulosity
• Guilt
• Sense of Personal & Moral Failure

15. Conclusions
• Material scrupulosity may be an important
variable in explaining difficulty discarding.
• Material scrupulosity may explain why people
with HD often cannot discard, even when they
aren’t attached to the item.

16. Thanks to..
• The H/C group and others who:
• 1. suggested the idea, and
• 2. granted us interviews to flush out the
construct