Culture and psychopathology: superstition and obsessive-compulsive cognitions and symptoms in a non-clinical Italian sample

Two-hundred and fifty-eight high and low superstitious students completed the Italian versions of well-established measures of obsessive-compulsive cognitions and symptoms, depression, anxiety and worry. After controlling for anxiety and depression, high superstitious subjects scored higher than low-superstitious on measures of overestimation of threat, impaired mental control, contamination and worry. A logistic regression analysis showed that overestimation of threat and perfectionism discriminated high from low superstitious subjects over and above anxiety and depression measures. However, perfectionism was negatively correlated with superstitiousness. One hypothesis for this result was that perfectionism is more closely linked with checking behaviors (which, in fact, did not characterize our group of superstitious individuals) under the assumption that specific cognitive domains may account for specific obsessive-compulsive behavior in a meaningful way. It was concluded that superstitiousness may be a predisposing factor for general instead of specific psychopathology, but that cultural factors may moderate the relation between superstitiousness and psychopathology.