Abstract
An unwanted thought appears to be cued easily by reminders in the environment but often the thought itself seems to cue nothing more than the desire to eliminate it from consciousness. This unusual asymmetry in the way unwanted thoughts are linked to other thoughts was the focus of the present research. Participants who were asked to suppress a thought or to concentrate on it completed a task assessing the influence of priming on reaction time (RT) for word/non-word judgments. Results revealed that suppression under cognitive load produced asymmetric priming: Priming with the associate of a suppressed word speeded RT for the suppressed word, but priming with a suppressed word did not speed RT for associated words. These findings suggest that thought suppression induces an unusual form of cognitive accessibility in which movement of activation toward the suppressed thought from associates is facilitated but movement of activation away from the suppressed thought to associates is undermined.
Highlights
All too often, we find our consciousness drawn to a particular unwanted idea by most everything that comes to mind
Unwanted thoughts have unusual gravity—an attractiveness that makes it easy for the mind to move toward them but difficult for it to move away. This power of suppression of unwanted thoughts reveals itself in an asymmetric pattern of reminding: anything related to an unwanted thought seems to remind us of that thought, the thought itself does not seem to remind us of other related things
Data for the 7 participants who did not recall all cognitive load numbers correctly were excluded from analyses
Summary
We find our consciousness drawn to a particular unwanted idea by most everything that comes to mind. An initial observation of ease of return by Wegner, Schneider, Carter, and White (1987) found that after a period of thought suppression, people instructed to discontinue suppression of the thought and instead to begin thinking about it reported more returns of the thought than occurred without prior suppression This is likely to happen under conditions of mental load. Shipherd and Beck (1999) showed the inability to suppress rape-related thoughts in PTSD patients, Harvey and Bryant (1998) showed the same effect for accident-related thoughts in survivors of motor vehicle accidents with acute stress disorder, and Conway, Howell, and Giannopoulos (1991) showed impaired suppression of negative thoughts in dysphoric individuals Common to these studies with clinical and non-clinical populations is the finding that the unwanted thought is faster to return to consciousness when it is being actively suppressed. This effect, too, has been observed repeatedly (e.g., Arndt, Greenberg, Solomon, Pyszczynski, & Simon, 1997; Newman, Duff, & Baumeister, 1997; Page, Locke, & Trio, 2005)
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary 
Published Version (
Free)
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a call