What do you really need? Self- and partner-reported intervention preferences within cognitive behavioural therapy for reassurance seeking behaviour.

BACKGROUND

Reassurance seeking (RS) in obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD) is commonly addressed in cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) using a technique called reducing accommodation. Reducing accommodation is a behaviourally based CBT intervention that may be effective; however, there is a lack of controlled research on its use and acceptability to clients/patients, and case studies suggest that it can be associated with negative emotional/behavioural consequences. Providing support to encourage coping with distress is a cognitively based CBT intervention that may be an effective alternative, but lacks evidence regarding its acceptability.

AIMS: This study aimed to determine whether support provision may be a more acceptable/endorsed CBT intervention for RS than a strict reducing accommodation approach.

METHOD: Participants and familiar partners (N = 179) read vignette descriptions of accommodation reduction and support interventions, and responded to measures of perceived intervention acceptability/adhereability and endorsement, before completing a forced-choice preference task.

RESULTS

Overall, findings suggested that participants and partners gave significantly higher ratings for the support than the accommodation reduction intervention (partial η2 = .049 to .321). Participants and partners also both selected the support intervention more often than the traditional reducing accommodation intervention when given the choice.

CONCLUSIONS

Support provision is perceived as an acceptable CBT intervention for RS by participants and their familiar partners. These results have implications for cognitive behavioural theory and practice related to RS.