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CHAPTER 4 114 showed good test-retest reliability, and the CCS and its subscales had very high internal consistency. Moderate to strong correlations between the CCS, CCS subscales, and Checklist, and validated scales (the OCI-R, OCI-R checking subscale, OBQ-44 RT, and BAI) suggest that the self-constructed measures are valid. Finally, a comparable self-constructed CCS was used by Deacon & Maack (2008), and they also devised their own safety behavior manipulation, as did Olatunji et al. (2011). However, future research is necessary to validate the self-constructed measures that were used in this study. A final limitation is that participants in the experimental group may have guessed the hypothesis and acted accordingly. However, post-test enquiry about the goal of the experiment did not reveal an expectancy bias. In conclusion, checking behavior appears to increase OCD-related cognitions about the severity of threat, which, together with results from previous studies, suggests that safety behavior contributes directly to the exacerbation of anxiety and OCD symptoms, and may thus be involved in the development of anxiety disorders and OCD. Although future research should further examine the underlying mechanisms of how safety behavior increases threat perception (e.g. cognitive dissonance theory in relation to OCD (Cougle & Lee, 2014; Gillan & Robbins, 2014) and behavior as information (Gangemi et al., 2012; van den Hout et al., 2014), it seems possible that normal episodes of checking increase perceived threat and uncertainty, and in that way contribute to the development of compulsive checking. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS We thank Marcel van den Hout for his help with the selection and development of study materials, and his valuable comments on an earlier version of this manuscript. We thank Lieke Harrewijn and Sofie Aartsma for their help with data collection, and anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments on a previous version of this manuscript.