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To date, studies of information processing in anxiety disorders have suggested that the latter are characterised by vigilance for threatening stimuli, possibly specific to personally relevant threat content. The present study represents an attempt to establish whether patients suffering from Obsessional Compulsive Disorder (OCD), generally classified as an anxiety disorder, show a similar cognitive bias. Thus, a replication of MacLeod, Mathews and Tata's (1986) study [Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 95, 15–20] is reported, employing modified materials of direct concern to the OCD subjects i.e. Contamination-related words. The results did indeed reveal content specific vigilance, whereby the OCD group were more vigilant for contamination content than mood-matched High Trait Anxious (HTA) controls, but the reverse was true for Social Anxiety words. Additionally, while a general threat interference effect was …