www.ijcrt.org © 2020 IJCRT | Volume 8, Issue 2 February 2020 | ISSN: 2320-2882 IJCRT2002042 International Journal of Creative Research Thoughts (IJCRT) www.ijcrt.org 316 Metacognition and Thought Control Strategies in Adolescents with OCD *Ms. Nabanita Barua, **Dr. Shweta Singh, ***Dr. Vivek Agarwal *MPhil in Clinical Psychology Final Year Trainee , **Associate Professor , ***Professor Department of Psychiatry, King George’s Medical University, Lucknow, Uttar Pradesh. Abstract: This cross-sectional and correlational research study was undertaken to assess metacognitive and thought control strategies in adolescents with OCD and to compare with matched healthy controls. Purposive sampling was used. Volunteering and symptomatic adolescents aged 10 to 16 years of age, matched to age, gender, and education were recruited in the study(n=20) and control group(n=20), respectively. MINI KID 7.2.0, C-YBOCS, MCQ-C, and TCQ-CA were administered. The study group scored more on negative belief about worry, SPR, cognitive monitoring, worry, punishment, and re-appraisal. The symptom severity was found to be significantly correlated to negative belief about worry(0.49, p<0.05), SPR (0.45, p<0.05), over all metacognitive beliefs(0.58, p<0.01), and worry (0.48, p<0.05). Findings suggest that metacognitive beliefs and thought control strategies have significant relationship with symptom severity in OCD, respectively. The smaller sample size do not allow generalizability of the findings. Index Terms- Metacognitive beliefs, thought control strategies, OCD, adolescents. I. INTRODUCTION Adolescents are capable of worry and have abstract capacity to form beliefs about the their thoughts. This capacity develops and betters itself as children mature into adolescence. Ego-centrism and beliefs about social taboos, enable adolescents to evaluate their cognitive and social behaviour. Thoughts become important to adolescents, as their capacity to anticipate and comprehend future repercussions improve (Klaczynski, 2005). Worrying is common in children as young as 7 years of age( Piaget, 1970). Worrying and fears are non-pathological in nature and developmentally it is essential for existence from evolutionary perspective. However, recent decade has brought to light that it is not just intrusive thoughts but the belief in their significance and need to rectify the dissonance resultant of intrusive distressing thoughts brings attention towards the metacognitive processes and thought control strategies involved in psychological disorders. Adolescents are capable of metacognitive beliefs, beliefs about the significance of thoughts and seem to imply strategies to contain the overt distress caused by them( Steinberg, 2004 ). Metacognition which is better understood as cognition about cognition, that is, awareness of knowledge, cognitive beliefs, strategies playing role in cognitive awareness, appraisal, and need to control thoughts and cognitive process seems to play mediatory factors towards obsessive compulsive beliefs resulting into thought control strategies(Wilson & Hall, 2012 ). Wells’ metacognitive model of various anxiety disorder explains the importance of metacognitive processes as an etiological and maintaining factor in psychological disorders. The model leads with cognitive attentional bias towards intrusive thoughts, activation of beliefs about thoughts and it’s importance. This leads to maladaptive coping strategies to neutralize the distress. These maladaptive strategies have paradoxical effects. They flare cognitive overt distress due to increased appraisal of intrusion, incompetence to countervail the intrusive thoughts, and distress caused by it. It is analogous to not thinking about ‘the yellow bus’ , which is inevitable s ince suppression only exacerbates the pathology(Wells, 1997). Such intrusions are very likely in obsessive compulsive disorder. Obsessive compulsive disorder is commonly defined by intrusive ruminations and acts that may be covert, overt or both to neutralize the distress caused by them. International classification of mental disorder states that individual is aware of the futility of the phenomena and recognizes them as his or her own. This is not uncommon in children and adolescents( Rasmussen & Eisen, 1990). However, such studies have been much common among adults with very few studies generalized for adolescent population. Previous studies have indicated that higher cognition like belief about one’s thought process and thought control strategies play a ro le in the maintenance and exacerbation of the symptomatology. These studies have provided us with results that generalised on the adult population and a few studies that included older adolescents (Wells et al,1997, Purdon& Clark, 1999, Cartwright-Hatton et al. 2004,Touson & Irak, 2008, Hauser et. al 2017). However, a few studies also explored these variable in children and adolescents from age range 7-17 years (Baccow et al. 2009, 2010) or adolescents across age range 10-17 years (Meiser-Stedman, 2014).,Studies also indicate the children and adolescents are capable of higher cognitive skills of monitoring, knowing about knowing as studied by Flavell, Freidrich, & Hyot in 1970. These metacognitive strategies are measurable (Wells et al., 1997; Cartwright-Hatton et al.,2004).