Abstract

In this study, we are investigating the relationship between trait levels of incompleteness (feeling of dissatisfaction or unease coming from a perceived insufficiency or need for things to be “just right”), disgust (emotional response characterized by aversion to stimuli), and obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) symptoms (a mental health condition characterized by the presence of obsessions or compulsions). There has been previous research done to show that both incompleteness and disgust are associated with OCD symptoms, but the combination of the two in a lab experiment has yet to be looked at. In the study, each participant will complete four different behavioral avoidance tasks involving previously validated disgust stimuli. The participants will be instructed to interact with each stimulus in increasingly difficult ways and rate their disgust levels after each task on a scale from 0 to 5. The main focus is on creating the stimuli and preparing to run a lab protocol in full before the 2024-2025 school year.