Unlocking Their Potential

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OCD in children and adolescents is a distressing condition, which is often chronic and persists into adulthood. Almost 90% of these young patients have problems at school, home, or socially; with difficulties doing homework and concentrating at school being the two most common problems. Children and adolescents are well set up for learning and, indeed, can quickly pick up new foreign languages, computing skills or motor tasks, such as riding a bike, much quicker than older adults. But if an adolescent is not learning well in school, they are likely to become stressed and anxious.

Researchers at the University of Cambridge have previously shown that there are core problems of cognitive inflexibility in adults with OCD. Since flexibility in problem-solving is an important skill for performance in school, they wanted to study whether adolescents with OCD had difficulty in this area. Cognitive flexibility becomes important when trying to find the correct solutions to a problem, particularly when your first attempt at solving that problem does not work. To reach the correct solution, you have to switch to a new approach from the one you have previously been using.