You can't always think what you want: Problems in the suppression of unwanted thoughts

Publisher Summary This chapter deals with psychological deadlock-between the urge to suppress, and the daunting task of suppression. A general account of thought suppression is offered that considers the pressures that instigate suppression, the process of suppression, and post-suppression processes and consequences. This account treats thought suppression as one of a class of phenomena of mental control-conscious attempts to control psychological contents and processes and suggests how thought suppression may be involved in the larger enterprise of the self-control of emotion, action, and communication in social life. Sigmund Freud is responsible both for thought suppression, and for initiating the study of repression. Suppression is provoked when the person's situation prompts the inhibition of some external expression of a thought. Normally, the external expressions people attempt to forestall in this way take the form of actions, communications, or emotional expressions. In each case, thought suppression is attempted as a preemptive strategy aimed at inhibition of the overt psychological consequences of the thought. The experimental study of thought suppression echoes the same implications that Freud drew from his psychoanalytic study of repression.

[1]  R. Bjork,et al.  Disrupted Retrieval in Directed Forgetting: A Link With Posthypnotic Amnesia , 1983 .

[2]  William B. Stiles,et al.  I Have to Talk to Somebody , 1987 .

[3]  M. Kozak,et al.  Emotional processing of fear: exposure to corrective information. , 1986, Psychological bulletin.

[4]  Susan T. Fiske,et al.  Examining the role of intent: Toward understanding its role in stereotyping and prejudice. , 1989 .

[5]  M. Horowitz.  Intrusive and repetitive thoughts after experimental stress. A summary. , 1975, Archives of general psychiatry.

[6]  C. Steele,et al.  Alcohol myopia. Its prized and dangerous effects. , 1990, The American psychologist.

[7]  A. Marcel.  Conscious and unconscious perception: An approach to the relations between phenomenal experience and perceptual processes , 1983, Cognitive Psychology.

[8]  J. M. Olson,et al.  What the Shadow Knows: Person Perception in a Surveillance Situation , 1976 .

[9]  K. Mccaul,et al.  Distraction and coping with pain. , 1984, Psychological bulletin.

[10]  F. Strack,et al.  Effects of salience and time pressure on ratings of social causality , 1982 .

[11]  M. Posner,et al.  Attention and cognitive control. , 1975 .

[12]  W J Jacobs,et al.  Stress-induced recovery of fears and phobias. , 1985, Psychological review.

[13]  Daniel M. Wegner,et al.  Stress and mental control. , 1988 .

[14]  Inhibition of internally cued behavior. , 1990 .

[15]  T. Pruzinsky,et al.  Preliminary exploration of worry: some characteristics and processes. , 1983, Behaviour research and therapy.

[16]  D. Cioffi.  BEYOND ATTENTIONAL STRATEGIES : A COGNITIVE-PERCEPTUAL MODEL OF SOMATIC INTERPRETATION , 1991 .

[17]  J. Polivy,et al.  Dieting and binging: A causal analysis. , 1985 .

[18]  P. Devine.  Stereotypes and prejudice: Their automatic and controlled components. , 1989 .

[19]  Daniel T. Gilbert,et al.  Journal of Personality and Social Psychology of Thoughts Unspoken Social Inference and the Self-regulation of Behavior , 2022 .

[20]  J. Bargh.  Automatic and conscious processing of social information. , 1984 .

[21]  T. Borkovec.  Heart-rate process during systematic desensitization and implosive therapy for analog anxiety. , 1974 .

[22]  G. Logan.  On the ability to inhibit simple thoughts and actions: I. Stop-signal studies of decision and memory. , 1983 .

[23]  D. Gilbert.  How mental systems believe. , 1991 .

[24]  E B Ebbesen,et al.  Cognitive and attentional mechanisms in delay of gratification. , 1972, Journal of personality and social psychology.

[25]  Instructed forgetting: hypnotic and nonhypnotic. , 1983 .

[26]  J. Pennebaker.  Confession, Inhibition, and Disease , 1989 .

[27]  G. Logan.  On the ability to inhibit thought and action , 1984 .

[28]  R. Davidson,et al.  Low-anxious, high-anxious, and repressive coping styles: psychometric patterns and behavioral and physiological responses to stress. , 1979, Journal of abnormal psychology.

[29]  D M Wegner,et al.  Depression and mental control: the resurgence of unwanted negative thoughts. , 1988, Journal of personality and social psychology.

[30]  L. Hasher,et al.  Automatic and effortful processes in memory. , 1979 .

[31]  S. Rachman,et al.  Abnormal and normal obsessions. , 1978, Behaviour research and therapy.

[32]  J. Bargh,et al.  The Role of Consciousness in Priming Effects on Categorization , 1987 .

[33]  A. Hochschild.  Emotion Work, Feeling Rules, and Social Structure , 1979, American Journal of Sociology.

[34]  Daniel M. Wegner,et al.  Paradoxical Effects of Thought Suppression , 1987 .

[35]  W. Mischel,et al.  Delay of gratification in children. , 1989, Science.

[36]  J. Stroop.  Studies of interference in serial verbal reactions. , 1992 .

[37]  The Role of Thought Suppression in the Bonding of Thought and Mood , 1991 .

[38]  E. Ebbesen,et al.  Attention in delay of gratification. , 1970 .

[39]  Repression and the inaccessibility of affective memories. , 1987 .

[40]  G. Logan.  Toward an instance theory of automatization. , 1988 .

[41]  R. Bjork.  Retrieval inhibition as an adaptive mechanism in human memory. , 1989 .

[42]  J. Uleman.  A framework for thinking intentionally about unintended thoughts , 1989 .

[43]  Gordon H. Bower,et al.  Failure to replicate mood-dependent retrieval , 1985 .

[44]  W. Mischel,et al.  Cognitive appraisals and transformations in delay behavior. , 1975 .

[45]  Carolin J. Showers,et al.  Social Cognition: A Look at Motivated Strategies , 1985 .

[46]  D. Beidel,et al.  Biological factors in obsessive-compulsive disorders. , 1985, Psychological bulletin.

[47]  B. Depaulo,et al.  Nonverbal behavior and self-presentation. , 1992, Psychological bulletin.

[48]  J. Bargh,et al.  Individual construct accessibility, person memory, and the recall-judgment link: The case of information overload. , 1985 .

[49]  D. S. Holmes,et al.  Investigations of repression; differential recall of material experimentally or naturally associated with ego threat. , 1974, Psychological bulletin.

[50]  Symptomatology and management of acute grief , 1944 .

[51]  C. Lerman,et al.  Stimulus control applications to the treatment of worry. , 1983, Behaviour research and therapy.

[52]  Walter Schneider,et al.  Controlled and automatic human information processing: II. Perceptual learning, automatic attending and a general theory. , 1977 .

[53]  The suppression of exciting thoughts. , 1990 .

[54]  B. Weiner.  Effects of motivations on the availability and retrieval of memory traces. , 1966 .

[55]  E. Klinger,et al.  Modes of Normal Conscious Flow , 1978 .

[56]  E. Ellis.  A review of empirical rape research: Victim reactions and response to treatment , 1983 .

[57]  L. L. Martin,et al.  Set/reset: use and disuse of concepts in impression formation. , 1986, Journal of personality and social psychology.

[58]  Daniel M. Wegner,et al.  The hyperaccessibility of suppressed thoughts. , 1992 .

[59]  D. Wegner,et al.  Social foundations of mental control , 1993 .

[60]  R. C. Silver,et al.  Coming to terms with major negative life events. , 1989 .