Grant: Master's Award: Canada Graduate Scholarships

Intrusive thoughts (obsessions), and irresistible repetitive behaviours (compulsions) occur on a continuum from normal tendencies to severe symptoms in obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). Traditionally, OCD has been explained through a cognitive-behavioural model, which suggests that intrusive thoughts cause anxiety, leading individuals to perform compulsive actions to alleviate their harm-related fears. However, this model does not account for all OCD experiences.A growing body of evidence has revealed an underlying dimension of OCD known as incompleteness (INC). INC is characterized by a pervasive discomfort and the need to correct feelings of not just right -ness, or imperfections. Unlike harm avoidance, INC does not easily fit into the cognitive-behavioural model, where its compulsions often are in the absence of harm/fear. This study proposes that deficits in interoceptive awareness;the ability to detect and interpret body sensations;may help explain INC. Although interoceptive awareness has been recognized in other mental health conditions, its role in OCD, and INC specifically remains largely unexplored.The proposed research has two main goals: (1) to investigate how interoceptive awareness relates to INC, and (2) to evaluate interoceptive deficits during real-time not just right experiences. Study 1 will use well-validated self-report measures, and a heartbeat-detection task to assess interoceptive awareness in a non-clinical sample. Study 2 will induce not just right feelings in a lab setting and measure interoceptive awareness. This research aims to expand OCD models to include interoceptive deficits, potentially improving treatment approaches for OCD, and enhancing the understanding of INC as a universal human experience.