Thought action fusion and an experimental study with university students through the cognitive behavior model

Thought action fusion (TAF) is one of the cognitive factors defined as the equivalence of thoughts and behaviors and thought to be related to obsessive-compulsive disorder. This research consists of two stages: survey and experimental application. For the first stage of the study, a survey set was used to evaluate obsessive symptoms, thought action fusion, thought control, thought suppression and obsessive beliefs. In the experimental manipulation phase which is the second stage, the comparison groups, the quality of the target person determined as for the affinity group, (familiar-foreign) X thought content (accident-violence), and for the vulnerable group the quality of the target person (vulnerable-defensible) X thought content (accident- violence). Participants who were randomly assigned to the experimental groups were exposed to sentences with the content of the accident and violence to form a TAF in the experimental environment. Comparison groups were determined as independent variables of the study.The variables of discomfort, anxiety, guilt, responsibility, desire for neutralization, level of thought, frequency of thought, level of moral error, the likelihood of experiencing and similarity with reality are dependent variables of the study. Since repeated measurements were taken from the same participants, Repeated Measures ANOVA was used to test hypotheses. Correlation analysis was conducted to investigate the relationship between the data obtained from the survey measurements and the relationship between the dependent variables and the data obtained from the survey measurements. As a result of the study, the levels of discomfort, anxiety, guilt, responsibility, discomfort, similarity with reality and desire to neutralize were found to be statistically higher than the foreign or defensible situations when thetarget person was close or vulnerable. It was observed that there was a significant and positive correlation between the data obtained from the survey measurements. It can be stated that the findings support the hypotheses of the study in general.