Attention biases associated with not just right experiences

Obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD) has been associated with attention biases to threatening stimuli. Research suggests that modifying these biases can lead to a reduction of symptoms. Although traditional cognitive models of OCD emphasize the role of harm avoidance, more recent models propose that obsessive compulsive (OC) symptoms can also be motivated by a sense of incompleteness or a desire for things to be 'just-right'. This study examined attention biases associated with incompleteness related OC symptoms in an unselected undergraduate sample (N = 79). Participants filled out self-report measures of OC and depressive symptoms, and completed a dot probe task which included "Not Just Right" (NJR) and "Just Right" (JR) images. It was hypothesized that self-reported OC symptoms would be positively associated with an attention bias towards images which appear NJR. Contrary to our hypothesis, in the full sample there was not a significant association between an attention bias to NJR stimuli and any of the self-report measures. However, several measures of OC symptoms were significantly negatively correlated with the disengaging index. Finally, there was initial evidence of potential gender moderation, with several significant or nearly significant moderate correlations between the measures of OC symptoms and the attention bias index in male but not female participants. Further research is warranted to elucidate the components of attention involved in an attention bias for NJR stimuli and to examine the moderators and correlates of this bias.