An Experimental Investigation of Factors Involved in Excessive Reassurance Seeking: The Effects of Perceived Threat, Responsibility and Ambiguity on Compulsive Urges and Anxiety
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Excessive reassurance seeking is a common problem among individuals diagnosed with Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD). Given the proposed functional similarities between OCD-related reassurance seeking and compulsive checking (Rachman, 2002), it was hypothesized that some of the factors contributing to the onset and maintenance of episodes of these two behaviours might be shared, whereas other factors (e.g., ambiguity of feedback) may play a unique role in the persistence of reassurance seeking. The current experiment examined how manipulations of threat, responsibility, and ambiguity of feedback impacted upon non-clinical participants' (N = 176) anxiety and compulsive urges (to seek reassurance and to check) in a series of experimental vignettes. Consistent with hypotheses, higher levels of perceived threat, responsibility and ambiguity of feedback were associated with higher anxiety and compulsive urges. Results are discussed in terms of cognitive-behavioural models of, and treatments for OCD.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".