‘Not Just Right’ feelings can affect thinking, KPU study finds

A study out of Kwantlen Polytechnic University finds that a sense of incompleteness, experienced by some people with obsessive-compulsive traits, can interfere with certain types of thinking.

“The ‘Not Just Right’ experience is a feeling of imperfection or incompleteness that results from a perceived disharmony in someone’s thoughts or environment,” says psychology graduate Aidan Sammel, who completed the study as his honours research project.

The Not Just Right experience is common, but varies in obsessive-compulsive disorders (OCD), a KPU press release states.

“Someone might get the feeling that something they said didn’t sound just right, or maybe their hands weren’t clean just right,” Sammel says.

He adds that the idea for the research started from his own experiences with OCD, where he too felt the Not Just Right experience.

Sammel’s feelings conflicted with existing studies that framed people with OCD as having deficits in executive function. Yet, his own experiences made him think the opposite is true — that obsessive-compulsive traits can cause deficits.

“From my own experience and also knowing other people who struggle with OCD and have very high executive functioning skills, I thought that this was a little bit too simplistic of an explanation,” he says.​

In the study, Sammel and Daniel Bernstein, KPU research chair in lifespan cognition, created a Not Just Right experience by showing participants a photo of a messy room. The image then suddenly disappeared after 10 seconds.

“The idea was that for people who struggle with Not Just Right experiences, the disorganization of the room would cause them to feel like something is off, and then they wouldn’t be able to try and neutralize that,” Sammel says.

Immediately following the photo, participants were tested on their working memory or cognitive flexibility, Sammel says, adding that they also completed a questionnaire about their obsessive-compulsive tendencies.

The study also had a control group that was shown a clean room, including the time participants had to view the image.

“We found that the relationship between obsessive-compulsive tendencies and executive function deficits for certain domains, such as cognitive flexibility, was mediated by the Not Just Right experience,” Sammel says. “Those deficits only showed up when people had higher Not Just Right experiences.”

Bernstein says research like Sammel’s is possible through the psychology honours program and the Student Research Innovation Grant, which allows students to pursue their ideas.

“There’s a lot of room for students to explore these kinds of questions, ideas, and research with a supervisor or a faculty member [one-on-one] that you just don’t have that time afforded at most research-intensive schools,” Bernstein says.

Sammel received the grant twice, including this honours thesis.

“Seeing your idea go from the theoretical kind of phase into doing the experiment, … publishing it — and it being seen by other researchers and potentially used for future research — is really rewarding,” Sammel says.

The study was published in the Journal of Behavioral and Cognitive Therapy.