Article1996

Suppression of Negative and Neutral Thoughts

Richard J. McNally · Joseph N. Ricciardi

72 citations0/0 files storedBehavioural and Cognitive Psychotherapy

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Anxiety, Depression, Psychometrics, Treatment, Cognitive Processes Memory Processes and Influences Mind wandering and attention

Abstract

Testing a variant of Wegner's (1989) “thought suppression” paradigm, we had subjects identify a personally-relevant negative thought that had been troubling them recently. Subjects were then randomly assigned either to a negative target thought group or to a neutral target thought (“white bear”) group, and randomly assigned either to an initial suppression condition (followed by a free expression period) or an initial free expression condition (followed by a suppression period). The results revealed that subjects in the neutral thought group experienced a decline in thoughts about white bears throughout the course of the experiment, whereas subjects asked first to suppress a personally relevant negative thought experienced nearly a three-fold increase in its frequency of occurrence when later given permission to express it. These findings suggest that negatively valent thoughts may respond differently than neutral thoughts following attempts to suppress them.

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References

1994Thought suppression induces intrusion in naturally occurring negative intrusive thoughts 1990White bears and other unwanted thoughts 1989Behaviour therapy and obsessional ruminations: Can failure be turned into success?1994Effects of suppressing thoughts about emotional material.1994Personally relevant intrusions outside the laboratory: Long-term suppression increases intrusion 1990Thought Suppression Induces Intrusions 1993A further experimental investigation of thought suppression 1992Suppression of emotional and neutral material

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1996Modelling cognition in emotional disorder: The S-REF model 2000Thought Suppression 2001Paradoxical effects of thought suppression: a meta-analysis of controlled studies 1999Thought suppression and psychopathology 2015Thought Suppression and Psychopathology 2004Consequences of Stereotype Suppression and Internal Suppression Motivation: A Self-Regulation Approach

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