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4 SAFETY BEHAVIOR INCREASES OBSESSION-RELATED COGNITIONS 111 Lee, 2014; Myers, Fisher, & Wells, 2008; Tolin, Worhunsky, & Maltby, 2006). Considering that the OBQ-44 has low sensitivity to treatment change ( Beck , van Oppen, Cath, Emmelkamp, Smit, & van Balkom, 2010), it seems plausible that general beliefs about inflated responsibility and exaggerated threat perceptions were not affected by increasing checking behavior for one week. Perhaps if participants engaged in excessive checking behavior for many weeks, these beliefs would increase. General anxiety did not increase in any of the groups, which suggests that engaging in checking behavior specifically increased OCD-related checking cognitions. However, it should be noted that some researchers argue that the BAI mainly assesses panic symptomatology rather than anxiety in general (Cox, Cohen, Direnfeld, & Swinson, 1996; Leyfer, Ruberg, & Woodruff-Borden, 2006), even though it continues to be widely used as a measure to assess general anxiety (e.g., Abramowitz, Khandker, Nelson, Rygwall, & Deacon, 2006) and was also administered in the studies of Deacon and Maack (2008) and Olatunji et al. (2011). Future studies could consider using other measures of anxiety such as the State Trait Anxiety Inventory (STAI; Spielberger, 1983) or Depression, Anxiety, and Stress Scale (DASS; Henry & Crawford, 2005) to further investigate the influence of checking behavior on general anxiety symptoms. The overall decrease in BAI scores seems to be caused by the monitor group. In addition to a decrease in general anxiety, the monitor group showed a pre- to post-test decrease in the amount of items they daily checked, and a decrease in cognitions about the importance of checking. In comparison, the control group did not show any changes. It thus appears that monitoring daily checking behavior decreased the amount of checking behavior participants engaged in, which in turn may have decreased cognitions about the importance of checking and general anxiety. This is in line with previous research, which suggests that self-monitoring causes a decrease in negative behavior and psychopathological symptoms (see Craske & Tsao, 1999). Additionally, when looking at the findings of Olatunji et al. (2011), it seems that monitoring safety behavior