| The positive occurrence rate of obsessive-compulsive disorder(OCD)among college students has reached as high as 12%.OCD has become an increasingly prominent psychological problem in recent years,with compulsive behaviors being the more frequently occurring case.There have always been examples of theoretically conceptualizing OCD through control,treating it as a measure against the decrease in perceived control towards an individual’s response.Despite the fact that compensatory control theory has been validated in different areas of life,no empirical research has yet proved that compulsive behaviors can be treated as means of compensatory control.Is it correct to categorize compulsive behaviors among one of the inevitable results of low-control situation? What are the significances of compulsive behaviors to an individual? To answer these questions,this study has examined the theoretical applicability of the compensatory control theory in compulsive behaviors.Three separate experiments,consisting of 5 tests in total,have been conducted to verify this hypothesis.In the first experiment,questionnaire surveys were carried out to find out the empirical relationship between perceived control and compulsive behavior.The results showed that when the level of individual perceived control was normal,no abnormal behavior was observed,but when perceived control was lacking,compulsive behaviors would emerge.In the second experiment,two empirical tests were conducted to verify the hypothesis that a compulsive behavior(in this case,the act of cleaning a keyboard),just like any external control resources(e.g.government control),could serve as an individual’s compensatory control strategy against the temporary decrease in the level of perceived control.The results,obtained from tests on non-clinical samples,indicated that when the test subject experienced a temporary decrease in perceived control,the emergence of a compulsive behavior could achieve the same result in mitigating the individual’s level of anxiety as an external control resource,i.e.,compulsive behavior is not an inevitable response in a low-control situation.The third experiment applied a backward psychological process to examine whether a decrease in perceived control would reduce the occurring tendency of a compulsive behavior.The results showed that when the individual’s perceived control increased instead of decreased,he would spend less time cleaning the keyboard.To conclude,this study has not only successfully expanded the scope of interpretation towards the compensatory control theory through a series of empirical research,but has also offered a different perspective on understanding the compulsive behavior of non-clinical samples. |
