Regarding the importance of obsessive compulsive disorders (OCD), the aim of this paper is to examine some of the roots of OCD with relation to the socio-cultural factors. By using the two dimensions of TAF, likelihood and moral, we conducted a survey research based on three groups: 1) OCD patients (39 samples), 2) patients with other anxiety disorders rather than OCD (19 samples) 3) and normal participants (30 samples) to allow us different comparisons between these three groups.

Results show that there are positive correlation between TAF beliefs and the obsessive compulsive symptoms. Also, compared with normal participants, patients with OCD and patients that have other anxiety disorders had a higher level of TAF-likelihood-other belief. The occurrence of thought suppression was more or less equal in OCD and other anxiety patients, although it was higher compared with normal groups.

Most of previous researches found a higher level of TAF-likelihood than TAF-moral in OCD patients indicating that the interpretation thoughts about the likelihood of the occurrence of a negative event is a stronger mechanism than the engagement in the anxiety raised from immoral thoughts. However, the results of this study showed a contrary finding as in our samples, the mechanism of TAF-moral was stronger than TAF-likelihood.

Explaining this finding, we got deeper to the cultural and religious beliefs of the targeted population and through qualitative interviews with some of the audiences we realized that there are a plenty of religious and cultural elements that foster the mechanism of TAF-morality.