An Experimental Investigation of Responsibility and Reassurance: Relationships with Compulsive Checking

Inflated perceptions of responsibility are hypothesized to contribute to compulsive checking. Reassurance seeking, proposed to be a form of checking, may exacerbate checking behaviour in the long run. A sample of non-clinical participants (N = 100) performed a complex manual classification task under 1 of 4 experimental conditions: high responsibility-high reassurance, high responsibility-low reassurance, low responsibility-high reassurance, or low responsibility-low reassurance, and provided ratings of anxiety, urges to check, urges to seek reassurance, and confidence both before and after experimental manipulations were employed. Higher levels of perceived responsibility were associated with the maintenance of compulsive urges and doubt. Results are discussed in terms of cognitive and behavioural models of obsessive-compulsive disorder, and in terms of directions for future research.