Psychological explanations of OCD are made up of firstly, behavioral and secondly cognitive explanations. Although they both explain the obsessions and compulsions of OCD in different ways, they each have their own ways of interpreting the aspects of OCD and how people behave.

Behavioral explanations of OCD talk about how obsessions and compulsions are learned behaviors. The acquisition of obsessions is a two way process; classical conditioning talks about how a neutral stimulus becomes associated with anxiety, whereas operant conditioning describes how the anxiety associated with the stimulus is maintained by avoidance. An individual who avoids the feared stimulus leads to positive outcomes, and is therefore negatively reinforcing. Classical and Operant conditioning predicts that OCD patients have been predisposed to rapid conditioning. Tracy et al support this view; as they separated students into an ‘OCD like’ group and a control group based on their answers to an obsessive compulsive symptom checklist. They then used and eye blink task to see how much time it took for students in each group to condition (blink in response to a bell.) Their results showed that some OCD-like students were conditioned more quickly, and so this is one strength to support how conditioning has an effect on OCD patients.

The other side of behavioral explanations of OCD is compulsions which suggest that the obsessions associated with anxiety are reduced following the compulsive behavior, and thus compulsive rituals are learned behaviors. This raises an issue that if the performance of compulsive behaviors reduces anxiety, then surely blocking the compulsions should lead to a rise in anxiety levels. Rachman and Hodgson carried out an experiment on OCD patients who were asked to act out the anxiety provoking activity, in which patients were either allowed to carry out compulsive