Thought suppression.

Although thought suppression is a popular form of mental control, research has indicated that it can be counterproductive, helping assure the very state of mind one had hoped to avoid. This chapter reviews the research on suppression, which spans a wide range of domains, including emotions, memory, interpersonal processes, psychophysiological reactions, and psychopathology. The chapter considers the relevant methodological and theoretical issues and suggests directions for future research.

Covering up what can't be seen: concealable stigma and mental control.

In these studies the authors examined the effects of concealing a stigma in a social interaction relevant to the stigma. An interview paradigm called for undergraduate female participants who either did or did not have eating disordered characteristics to play the role of someone who did or did not have an eating disorder (ED) while answering stigma-relevant questions. The data suggest that the participants who concealed their stigmas become preoccupied with the control of stigma-relevant thoughts. In Study 1, participants with an ED who role-played not having an ED exhibited more secrecy, suppression, and intrusive thoughts of their ED and more projection of ED-related thoughts onto the interviewer than did those with an ED who role-played someone with an ED or those without an ED who role-played someone without an ED. This finding was replicated in Study 2, and the authors found both increasing accessibility of ED-related words among those participants with concealed stigmas during the interview and high levels of accessibility following the interview.

Apparent mental causation. Sources of the experience of will.

The experience of willing an act arises from interpreting one's thought as the cause of the act. Conscious will is thus experienced as a function of the priority, consistency, and exclusivity of the thought about the action. The thought must occur before the action, be consistent with the action, and not be accompanied by other causes. An experiment illustrating the role of priority found that people can arrive at the mistaken belief that they have intentionally caused an action that in fact they were forced to perform when they are simply led to think about the action just before its occurrence.

Ironic effects of trying to relax under stress.

Two studies found that intentional relaxation under conditions of mental load or stress produces ironic increases in skin conductance level (SCL). In Experiment 1, participants instructed to relax under the high mental load of rehearsing a long number had higher SCL than those instructed to relax under low load, and tended to have higher SCL than those under high load not instructed to relax. In Experiment 2, participants were instructed to relax or were not so instructed while they answered questions described either as measures of IQ or as unimportant. Those in the more loading and stressful situation who were asked to relax had greater SCL during the questions than those not asked to relax.

Deep cognitive activation: a new approach to the unconscious.

Deep cognitive activation occurs when a thought is so accessible as to have measurable effects on behavior or judgement, but is yet not consciously reportable. This state of mind has unique properties mimicking some characteristics of the psychoanalytic unconscious, but following theoretically from a consideration of processes of cognitive activation. The sources and consequences of deep cognitive activation are examined, with a view toward understanding how this state is implicated in the assessment, etiology, and treatment of psychopathology.

Memories out of order: thought suppression and the disturbance of sequence memory.

Participants in 2 experiments watched a filmed story and then left the lab--with instructions not to think about the film, with instructions to think about the film, or with no instructions. Memories of the film, assessed on participants' return to the lab some 5 hr later, showed reliable effects of thought suppression on memory for the sequence of events in the film. Participants who suppressed thoughts of the film were less able to retrieve the order of events by several measures than were those in the other groups, even thought their retrieval of the events themselves as assessed by recognition, free recall, and cued recall was not generally impaired.

Ironic effects of sleep urgency.

Normal sleepers were instructed either to fall asleep as quickly as they could or to fall asleep whenever they desired, under a high mental load (listening to John Philip Sousa marches) or a low mental load (listening to sleep-conducive new age music). Under low load, participants trying to fall asleep quickly did so faster than those attempting only to fall asleep whenever they desired. Under high load, however, and consistent with the ironic process theory of mental control (Wegner, D. M., 1994, Psychological Review, 101, 34-52), sleep onset latency was greater for participants attempting to fall asleep quickly than for those not attempting to do so.

On being cool and collected: mood regulation in anticipation of social interaction.

This study examined the influence of anticipated social interaction on the regulation of moods. Study 1 induced happy and sad moods through exposure to music. All participants expected to perform a second, unrelated experimental task either by themselves of with another participant. Participants who expected to do the task alone subsequently selected positive and negative news stories equally, but those who expected to interact preferred stories containing material incongruent with their mood. Study 2 confirmed this outcome, but showed it was confined primarily to anticipation of interaction with partners who are expected to be in neutral or good moods themselves. In Study 3, participants whose mood was not manipulated reduced self-exposure to cheerful or depressing videos when they expected to interact with another.

Fanning old flames: emotional and cognitive effects of suppressing thoughts of a past relationship.

Cognitive and electrodermal effects of suppressing thoughts of an old flame were examined in 2 experiments. Participants were asked to think aloud about an old flame--a past close relationship that either was or was not still desired--as their skin conductance level (SCL) was measured. Participants continued to think aloud as they were instructed either not to think about their old flame or to perform a comparison task. Participants were then asked to think about the old flame again. Participants who had suppressed thoughts of a no-longer-desired relationship were inclined to think aloud more about it afterward whereas those who suppressed thoughts of a still-desired relationship did not show such a rebound but evidenced increased SCL.

Chronic thought suppression.

We conducted several tests of the idea that an inclination toward thought suppression is associated with obsessive thinking and emotional reactivity. Initially, we developed a self-report measure of thought suppression through successive factor-analytic procedures and found that it exhibited acceptable internal consistency and temporal stability. This measure, the White Bear Suppression Inventory (WBSI), was found to correlate with measures of obsessional thinking and depressive and anxious affect, to predict signs of clinical obsession among individuals prone toward obsessional thinking, to predict depression among individuals motivated to dislike negative thoughts, and to predict failure of electrodermal responses to habituate among people having emotional thoughts. The WBSI was inversely correlated with repression as assessed by the Repression-Sensitization Scale, and so taps a trait that is quite unlike repression as traditionally conceived.

Ironic processes of mental control.

A theory of ironic processes of mental control is proposed to account for the intentional and counterintentional effects that result from efforts at self-control of mental states. The theory holds that an attempt to control the mind introduces 2 processes: (a) an operating process that promotes the intended change by searching for mental contents consistent with the intended state and (b) a monitoring process that tests whether the operating process is needed by searching for mental contents inconsistent with the intended state. The operating process requires greater cognitive capacity and normally has more pronounced cognitive effects than the monitoring process, and the 2 working together thus promote whatever degree of mental control is enjoyed. Under conditions that reduce capacity, however, the monitoring process may supersede the operating process and thus enhance the person's sensitivity to mental contents that are the ironic opposite of those that are intended.

Ironic processes in the mental control of mood and mood-related thought.

The mental control of mood and mood-related thought was investigated. In Experiment 1, Ss reminiscing about a happy or sad event were asked to make their mood positive, were given no instructions, or were asked to make their mood negative. Ss attempting mood control without an imposed cognitive load were successful, whereas those who attempted control while rehearsing a 9-digit number not only failed to control their moods but also showed self-reported mood change opposite the mood they intended to create. In Experiment 2, Ss attempting to control mood-related thoughts under cognitive load showed increased accessibility of those thoughts contrary to the direction of intended control in a Stroop-type color-naming task.

Transactive memory in close relationships.

Memory performance of 118 individuals who had been in close dating relationships for at least 3 months was studied. For a memory task ostensibly to be performed by pairs, some Ss were paired with their partners and some were paired with an opposite-sex partner from another couple. For some pairs a memory structure was assigned (e.g., 1 partner should remember food items, another should remember history items, etc.), whereas for others no structure was mentioned. Pairs studied together without communication, and recall was tested in individuals. Memory performance of the natural pairs was better than that of impromptu pairs without assigned structure, whereas the performance of natural pairs was inferior to that of impromptu pairs when structure was assigned.

The suppression of exciting thoughts.

We examined how the suppression of an exciting thought influences sympathetic arousal as indexed by skin conductance level (SCL). Subjects were asked to think aloud as they followed instructions to think about or not to think about various topics. Experiment 1 showed that trying not to think about sex, like thinking about sex, elevates SCL in comparison to thinking about or not thinking about less exciting topics (e.g., dancing). Experiment 2 revealed that the suppression of the thought of sex yielded SCL elevation whether or not subjects believed their think-aloud reports would be private or public, and it also revealed that the effect dissipated over the course of a few minutes. Experiment 3 found such dissipation again but showed that subsequent intrusions of the suppressed exciting thought are associated with further elevations in SCL over 30 min. Because such an association was not found when subjects were trying to think about the exciting thought, it was suggested that the suppression of exciting thoughts might be involved in the production of chronic emotional responses such as phobias and obsessive preoccupations.

That's easy for you to say: action identification and speech fluency.

Action identification theory holds that an action can be identified by the performer in different ways, and that these various act identities differ in their appropriateness for maintaining the action effectively. Optimal action identification exists when a personally easy action is identified in relatively high-level terms (i.e., the action's effects and implications) or a personally difficult action is identified in relatively low-level terms (i.e., the action's mechanical details). To test the optimality hypothesis with respect to speech fluency, subjects were asked to deliver a speech to either an easy-to-persuade audience or a difficult-to-persuade audience and induced to think about the action in either high-level or low-level terms. As predicted, subjects made fewer speech errors and felt more satisfied with their performance when the task was personally easy and identified at high level and when the task was personally difficult and identified at low level. Optimal action identification made things easier for them to say.

Depression and mental control: the resurgence of unwanted negative thoughts.

In three experiments we examined depressed individuals' mental control abilities and strategies. Experiment 1 revealed that although depressed college students were initially successful in suppressing negative material, they eventually experienced a resurgence of unwanted negative thoughts. Analysis of subjects' stream-of-consciousness reports indicated that this resurgence was associated with the use of negative thoughts as distracters from the unwanted item. In Experiment 2 depressed subjects acknowledged that positive distracters were more effective than negative ones in suppressing negative thoughts. This acknowledgement suggests that depressed subjects in Experiment 1 did not deliberately focus on negative distracters but that those thoughts automatically occurred because they were highly accessible. Experiment 3 demonstrated that depressed subjects' use of positive distracters could be increased somewhat when we provided such distracters and made them easily accessible. Taken together, the findings suggest that depression involves an enhanced accessibility of interconnected negative thoughts that can undermine mental control efforts.

Paradoxical effects of thought suppression.

In a first experiment, subjects verbalizing the stream of consciousness for a 5-min period were asked to try not to think of a white bear, but to ring a bell in case they did. As indicated both by mentions and by bell rings, they were unable to suppress the thought as instructed. On being asked after this suppression task to think about the white bear for a 5-min period, these subjects showed significantly more tokens of thought about the bear than did subjects who were asked to think about a white bear from the outset. These observations suggest that attempted thought suppression has paradoxical effects as a self-control strategy, perhaps even producing the very obsession or preoccupation that it is directed against. A second experiment replicated these findings and showed that subjects given a specific thought to use as a distracter during suppression were less likely to exhibit later preoccupation with the thought to be suppressed.

On sending artifact in search of artifact: reply to Mcdonald, Harris, and Maher.

Two studies are reported that show the McDonald, Harris, and Maher critique of our earlier experiment to be mistaken. In the first study, arousal-induced attention to self was demonstrated in a field setting devoid of any of the artifactual covariates of arousal induction suggested by these researchers. In the second study, a replication of the McDonald et al. experiment was conducted in which a crucial manipulation check that they failed to make was included. This check on the unusualness and embarrassment-producing properties of the manipulations revealed that their study was burdened by the very artifact they claimed might exist in ours. Although their slow-running manipulation was superficially similar to our fast-running manipulation, slow running created self-focus through unusualness and embarrassment, whereas fast running led to self-focus via arousal.

Observers' focus of attention in the simulation of self-perception.

This research was designed to assess the effects of a manipulation of observers' focus of attention--from a focus on the actor to a focus on the actor's situation--upon observers' attributions of attitude to an actor in a simulation of a forced-compliance cognitive dissonance experiment. Observers induced through empathy instructions to focus attention on the actor's situation inferred less actor attitude positivity than did observers given no specific observational set. In addition, situation-focused observers inferred that the actor's attitude was directly related to reward magnitude, whereas actor-focused observers inferred that the actor's attitude was inversely related to reward magnitude. An extension of self-perception theory, offered as an interpretation of these and other results, suggested that motivation attribution made by actors and observers in dissonance and simulation studies are dependent on focus of attention. The attributions made by actor-focused observers simulate those of objectively self-aware actors and are based upon perceived intrinsic motivation; the attributions of situation-focused observers simulate those of subjectively self-aware actors and are based upon perceived extrinsic motivation.