The suppressive power of positive thinking: Aiding suppression-induced forgetting in repressive coping

Abstract

Participants scoring high and low on a measure of repressive coping style (Mendolia, 2002) first learned a series of related word pairs (cue–target). Half of the cues were homographs. In the subsequent think/no-think phase (Anderson & Green, 2001), they responded with targets on some trials and suppressed thoughts of targets on others. Suppressed targets were always emotionally negative, as were targets associated with baseline cues reserved for the final test. Some participants were provided with emotionally benign or positive substitutes to help them suppress, and these substitutes were related to different meanings of the homographic cues, compared to those established by the targets. On the final test, all cues were presented for target recall. Only the repressors significantly benefited from the provision of positive substitutes to aid forgetting of the negative targets, regardless of the nature of the cues.

Keywords:

• Forgetting
• Suppression
• Repressive coping

Notes

¹Clearly, there are differences between the white-bear (WB) paradigm and the TNT paradigm. Among them is the fact that TNT controls the number of times the target is cued during the suppression phase whereas WB does not. And TNT requests suppression of multiple targets, compared to WB's request for just one. Here, we merely point to evidence that substitutes aid forgetting in both paradigms.

²Repressors’ scores ranged from 0 to 6 on the MAS and from 16 to 30 on the SDS. Participants’ scores in the control group ranged from 1 to 19 on the MAS and 2 to 19 on the SDS.

³At the end of the learning phase and again following recall, participants were asked to rate their mood on four scales: depressed/happy, tense/relaxed, pessimistic/optimistic, distressed/not-distressed. On each test, ratings differed only according to group, with the repressors rating themselves as uniformly more positive, p<.005. All interactions with condition were non-significant, p>.20. Therefore, mood did not confound the results of our manipulation. Across conditions, all moods became slightly more negative (decreasing an average of 5 points on the 100-point scale) from the first to the second administration (p<.006), and time did not interact significantly with suppression condition or group, p>.18.

⁴One control participant in the unaided condition produced a baseline–suppression difference of 83.3%, a difference greater than 3 SD from the mean of all differences in both unaided conditions and one that established the large error variance in that condition. The correlation of the suppression effect with ISE scores in the unaided condition remained close to 0.0 when those data were removed from the analysis, r(33)=.04, p=.795.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Leda McDaniel

Order of authorship was determined alphabetically.