Relapse to avoidance strategies (e.g., reliance on checking behaviors in obsessive-compulsive disorder or avoidance of social gatherings in social anxiety disorder) in the process of exposure is undesirable even for people suffering only from an anxiety disorder.
This pattern of results suggested that the functional roles of the NAc and orbital frontal cortex in checking behavior are to control the vigor of motor performance and the focus on goal-directed activity, respectively (Dvorkin et al., 2010).
This principle was employed in an algorithm developed to identify bouts of checking behavior and extract the 'time to next checking bout' (Dvorkin et al., 2006b).
Predictors of relapse included: the BP subtype of AN, severity of checking behaviors at pre-treatment, decrease in motivation to recover during treatment, and lower motivation to recover at post-treatment.
This measure is greatly reduced in quinpirole-sensitised rats showing compulsive checking, and has been proposed to index the third constitutive component of compulsive checking behavior, i.e. 'satiety' or rest after checking (Dvorkin et al., 2010).
Hence, we hypothesised that a pharmacological treatment that increases the focus on checking would result, in NAc lesion rats, in compulsive checking behavior.
This approach of 'analysis followed by synthesis' underlies the rationale for the current study where we aimed to synthesise compulsive checking behavior from the components identified in a previous analysis (Dvorkin et al., 2010).
Accordingly, it was expected that compulsive checking behavior would be evident only in the NAc lesion group injected with DPAT because only in this group would there be an effect on frequency of checking and length of check (due to a main effect of lesion), and on the recurrence time of checking and stops before returning to check (due to a main effect of drug).
Indeed, the brothers Dodge told me that Foursquare got people into the rhythm of checking in, a behavior they're clearly keen to harness.
Making your computer time less private by, for example, moving your computer into a family space can help keep your behavior in-check.
