A comparison of the effects of thought suppression, distraction and concentration.

This study compared the effects of suppression, focused-distraction, and concentration on controlling unwanted distressing thoughts, and examined how anxiety levels were associated with the use of each thought-control technique. In the study, college students were told to suppress thoughts about a distressing story, to suppress the same thoughts by focusing on an alternative distraction task, to simply concentrate on that alternative task, or to think about anything without restrictions for 6minutes. This initial period was followed by a "free-thinking" period to assess the delayed effect of thought-control techniques. The results indicated that focused-distraction and concentration led to fewer intrusions of target thoughts than suppression, and concentration in turn resulted in fewer target intrusions than focused-distraction during the initial period. Participants in the focused-distraction and concentration condition also tended to report lower anxiety during the initial period than those who were told to suppress thoughts.

Goal orientation, goal difficulty, and incentive values of academic goals.

We examined relationships among goal attributes (difficulty and affective value) and goal types (mastery, performance, intrinsic, and extrinsic). Goal attributes of positive affect value and relative salience of positive value were higher for intrinsic goals, mastery goals, and more difficult goals, qualified by an interaction between difficulty and type of goal. Intrinsic goals were more affectively positive than extrinsic goals and mastery goals were more positive than performance goals, but these differences vanished if goals were also perceived as difficult. Results were consistent with goal-orientation theories and suggest the usefulness of integrating incentive-attribute concepts with goal-orientation theories.

Motivation when optimism declines: data on temporal dynamics.

To contribute to a description of motivation variables across time, the authors examined temporal changes in these variables as the time to pursue a test-taking goal approached. In three samples, expected performance, grade-level standards, and perceived adequacy of effort decreased as the test time approached, but other indices of motivation did not always decrease. Data indicated that (a) there is a strong relationship between expectancies and implicit goal setting, (b) students may sometimes change goal levels and definitions of success to maintain their desire for chosen goals despite declining expectations, (c) effects of event proximity on goal-achievement expectations may be based on overestimating the adequacy of future effort, and (d) the degree to which expectancy and value predict motivation appears to vary with exam proximity. Results revealed a temporal complexity in motivation variables and in the relationships among them.

Learning and Processes of Associative Mediation.

In the attempt to evaluate product and process views of associative mediation, 80 male and female university students learned paired-associate lists under one of several instructional sets. Those with mediation instructions wrote down associative mediators on cards-with (Intentional) or without (Incidental) instructions to learn the pairs--as pairs were projected onto a daylight screen. Others learned with Standard or Repetition instructions. Incidental mediation instructions were at least equal to Intentional mediation instructions in percent recall and were superior in number of associative mediators produced for normatively linked pairs (p < .05). Production of a mediator was significantly predictive of later recall (p < .001), but mediational instructions may have improved recall even when a rote strategy or no effective strategy was reported. Thus neither the product nor the process view could be rejected; it appeared possible that both types of factor were operating.