Grant: Master's Award: Canada Graduate Scholarships

OCD is a highly prevalent condition that presents a major public health concern. Research has demonstrated that individuals with OCD exhibit excessive reassurance-seeking (ERS) behaviour. ERS involves repeatedly requesting information from others about situations that one sees as threatening. For example, individuals may engage in ERS upon making decisions. This behaviour appears to serve the purpose of briefly diminishing anxiety and perceived responsibility for harm. To the best of our knowledge, there has been no research to date investigating the relationship between ERS and decision-making among individuals with OCD. We plan to examine this relationship in the proposed study. ERS will be measured using the Reassurance-Seeking Scale, a self-report scale that measures ERS behaviour in response to decision-related, social, and general threats. We hypothesize that individuals with OCD will exhibit significantly higher levels of ERS in response to decision-related threats than will healthy controls. In addition, we hypothesize that seeking high levels of reassurance before making a decision will be positively correlated with impairment on a neurocognitive measure of decision-making, the Iowa Gambling Task, and with self-reported decision-making impairment on the Frost Indecisiveness Scale. Since ERS behaviour is associated with adverse outcomes such as interference with treatment and high levels of anxiety, gaining a greater understanding of the cognitive bases of this construct is paramount. This research will help inform treatments designed to decrease ERS behaviour and improve cognitive and social functioning among individuals with OCD.