The Impact of Threat Level and Performance Feedback on Checking Behaviour and Its Concomitants: A Multi-Site Study

Checking behaviours are commonly engaged to prevent adverse outcomes and alleviate uncertainty. Understanding how community populations engage in checking behaviours based on different factors such as threat level and performance feedback may inform us as to how checking behaviours become excessive in clinical obsessive-compulsive disorder populations. To address these questions, this study manipulated threat level (low threat: performance score only; high threat: mild electric shock based on performance score) and performance feedback (no feedback, feedback) during a visual discrimination and checking task. During the task, the participants' goal was to identify whether two shapes presented in succession were identical or different. Throughout the task, we recorded multiple read out measures: checking frequency, ratings of urge to check and distress, task performance, and corrugator supercilii activity. Data were recorded across two sites (n = 208). Higher versus lower-threat level, increased checking behaviour at one site but not the other. Furthermore, higher versus lower-threat levels improved task performance for identifying identical shapes versus different shapes. In addition, no feedback, compared to feedback, was associated with greater corrugator supercilii activity and improved task performance when identifying identical shapes versus different shapes. Overall, these findings provide insight into how factors such as threat level and performance feedback differently impact checking behaviour and its concomitants in community samples.