Paradoxical and less paradoxical effects of thought suppression: A critical review
Section snippets
The Basic Phenomena
Systematic research on thought suppression only started after Wegner and colleagues (1987) published their by now classic “white bear” experiments. The general outline of their critical experiment was as follows. Normal subjects were assigned to one of two groups. The first group was an “initial suppression” group in which subjects were instructed to suppress the thought of a white bear for a 5-minute period. Following this, subjects were given expression instructions: That is, they were asked
Individual Differences in Thought Suppression Tendencies
Results obtained by Merckelbach, Muris, Van den Hout, and De Jong (1991) indicate that people differ in how successful they are at thought suppressing. These authors found a positive relationship (r = .59, n = 35, p < .001) between the number of intrusions during suppression and the frequency of intrusions during control periods (see also Rutledge, Hollenberg, & Hancock, 1993). That is, subjects who reported a high frequency of intrusions when they tried to suppress a certain thought, also
Thought suppression and memory
It is widely believed that adults who have experienced traumatic childhood events may cope with these experiences by engaging in selective suppression of traumatic memories (e.g., Brett & Ostroff 1985, Terr 1991, Terr 1993). By this view, selective “forgetting” or thought suppressing would underlie psychogenic, or in DSM-IV terms dissociative, amnesia, that is, “an inability to recall important personal information, usually of a traumatic or stressful nature, that is too extensive to be
Implications for therapy
Wegner (1989) is clear about the lessons for treatment to be learned from thought suppression studies: “in many cases of unwanted thought, it may be best to stop suppressing” (p. 174). According to Wegner, thought suppression experiments provide a straightforward rationale for habituation- or exposure-oriented treatments. In clinical literature, some good examples can be found that seem to underline Wegner's position. Thought stopping is a case in point. In thought stopping treatment, the
Concluding remarks
The pioneering work of Wegner and colleagues (1987) on the paradoxical effects of thought suppression has stimulated a vast amount of research (see, for a review, Clark & Purdon, 1993). To date, more than 30 studies have documented immediate enhancement and/or rebound effects of thought suppression. Thus, it is safe to conclude that the paradoxical consequences of thought suppression represent robust phenomena. In contrast, the memory-out-of-order effect that is also ascribed to thought
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2021, NeuropsychologiaCitation Excerpt :In a conceptual context, the suppression of the processing of emotional stimuli and the suppression of emotions can be understood as the opposite of emotion acceptance (Hofmann and Asmundson, 2008; Campbell-Sills et al., 2006). It is known that attempts to suppress affective processing lead to increased negative and decreased positive emotions in the long term (Rassin et al., 2000). In addition, emotion suppression contributes to the persistence of BPD symptoms (Stepp et al., 2014).
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