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Individual differences in thought suppression. The White Bear Suppression Inventory: Factor structure, reliability, validity and correlates
Abstract
The White Bear Suppression Inventory [WBSI; Wegner, D.M. & Zanakos, S. (1994), Journal of Personality, 62, 615-640] is a self-report questionnaire measuring people's general tendency to suppress unwanted negative thoughts. The current article describes two studies investigating the reliability, factor structure, validity, and correlates of the WBSI. Study 1 (n = 172) showed that the WBSI is a reliable instrument in terms of internal consistency and test-retest stability. Factor analyses of the WBSI revealed a 1-factor solution. Furthermore, the WBSI was found to correlate positively with measures of emotional vulnerability and psychopathological symptoms. In Study 2 (n = 40), the relationship between WBSI and levels of intrusive thinking was examined in more detail, using a thought suppression task. In general, results of this thought suppression experiment provided evidence for the validity of the WBSI. That is, subjects with high WBSI scores exhibited higher frequencies of unwanted intrusive thoughts than subjects with low WBSI scores.
... The WBSI has strong test-retest reliability (r = .80, Muris, Merckelbach & Horselenberg, 1996;average r = .77, Wegner & Zanakos, 1994), and has consistently been found to have very good internal consistency (a = .87-.91, Blumberg, 2000;Hoping & de Jong-Meyer, 2003;Muris et al., 1996;Rassin, 2003;Spinhoven & van der Does, 1999;Wegner & Zanakos, 1994). ...
... Muris, Merckelbach & Horselenberg, 1996;average r = .77, Wegner & Zanakos, 1994), and has consistently been found to have very good internal consistency (a = .87-.91, Blumberg, 2000;Hoping & de Jong-Meyer, 2003;Muris et al., 1996;Rassin, 2003;Spinhoven & van der Does, 1999;Wegner & Zanakos, 1994). The scale was shown to have good predictive and convergent validity, correlating with measures of obsessional thinking, anxiety, and depression (Wegner & Zanakos, 1994) and frequencies of intrusive thinking in thought suppression experiments (Muris et al., 1996). ...
... Wegner & Zanakos, 1994), and has consistently been found to have very good internal consistency (a = .87-.91, Blumberg, 2000;Hoping & de Jong-Meyer, 2003;Muris et al., 1996;Rassin, 2003;Spinhoven & van der Does, 1999;Wegner & Zanakos, 1994). The scale was shown to have good predictive and convergent validity, correlating with measures of obsessional thinking, anxiety, and depression (Wegner & Zanakos, 1994) and frequencies of intrusive thinking in thought suppression experiments (Muris et al., 1996). ...
p>Homelessness continues to be a problem within society and over recent decades research into factors implicated in homelessness has featured in the literature. Within the literature a conceptual distinction is generally made between macro:level factors such as poverty and the limited availability of low-cost housing which explain the existence of homelessness within society, and micro-level factors, the focus of the current thesis, which influence individual vulnerability to becoming or remaining homeless. Initially, the literature regarding micro-level vulnerability factors for homelessness is reviewed, with five particular areas being selected for in-depth review. Models of the interrelationships between vulnerability factors are then described and discussed. Particularly strong evidence is found for childhood risk factors and substance use disorders constituting micro-level vulnerability factors for homelessness. It is also noted that empirical studies investigating the relationships between micro-level vulnerability factors for homelessness are limited in number and fail to consider the psychological processes which might mediate these relationships. On these grounds the present study sought to determine whether experiential avoidance mediates the relationship between poor childhood attachment and alcohol dependence in a sample of sixty homeless individuals. Somewhat surprisingly in the light of previous research linking childhood attachment and alcohol dependence, no significant association was found, suggesting that if these factors increase risk for homelessness, they do so independently. Significant predictive relationships were found, however, with regard to childhood attachment</p
... Furthermore, OGM in BPD has also been studied in relation to other (process) variables that have been found to be associated with OGM in depressed and traumatised samples (e.g., rumination, avoidance measures, executive functioning). As is shown in (Vanderlinden, van Dyck, Vertommen, Vandereycken, & Verkes, 1993); IES (Brom et al., 1986); RRS ; WAIS III (Wechsler, 2000); WBSI (Muris, Merckelbach, & Horselenberg, 1996). ...
... found that women more often retrieved observer memories than men, but we were not able to replicate this. (Vanderlinden et al., 1993); IES (Brom et al., 1986); RRS ; WAIS III (Wechsler, 2000); WBSI (Muris et al., 1996). ...
... to .89, and satisfactory test-retest reliability, r = .80 after 12 weeks (Muris, Merckelbach, & Horselenberg, 1996;Rassin, Muris, Schmidt, & Merckelbach, 2000). Some have found a onefactor solution ('thought suppression'; e.g., Muris et al., 1996;Rafnsson & Smari, 2001;Wegner & Zanakos, 1994), while others have found a second factor, which they called 'failure of suppression ', or 'intrusions' (Höping & de Jong-Meyer, 2003;Rassin, 2003). ...
Autobiographical memory (AM), “the aspect of memory that is concerned with the recollection of personally experienced past events” (Williams et al., 2007, p. 122), is believed to play an important role in the construction and maintenance of one’s self-concept. Compared to controls, patients with major depressive disorder (MDD) and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) have repeatedly found to show reduced memory specificity (‘overgeneral memory’, OGM). This is generally measured with a word cueing task, inviting participants to recall specific memories in response to cues, such as happy, or lazy. The aforementioned patients tend to retrieve categories of events, rather than memories that refer to a single episode. Furthermore, these patients tend to more often adopt a third-person (observer) perspective during voluntary recall. It has been suggested that OGM and observer memories dampen the emotional arousal evoked by painful memories, thereby preventing one’s self-concept to destabilise. However, in the longer term, in has been shown that both strategies increase one’s vulnerability for future complaints. Also, both strategies have found to be associated with rumination or comparison-driven processes, and OGM is found to correlate with reduced executive functioning.
Borderline personality disorder (BPD) is a common mental illness with high clinical burden. Although BPD patients often have co-morbid PTSD and MDD, findings on OGM are not fully replicated in these patients. The first aim of this thesis, therefore, was to get a clearer view on the associations between OGM and (co-morbid MDD and PTSD in) BPD. The second aim was to broaden the current knowledge on vantage point during recall, which, to our knowledge, has never been studied in BPD patients. Recent findings suggest that cues that are highly discrepant towards one’s current self-concept increase the likelihood of retrieving OGMs. The third aim was to further investigate the association between self-discrepancy on the one hand, and OGM and vantage point during recall on the other hand, both in relation to BPD (features).
After briefly situating our research aims (Chapter 1), we present an overview of the literature on OGM in BPD patients (Chapter 2). Our findings suggest that both depressed and traumatic state in BPD patients are unrelated to OGM (Chapters 3 and 4). Yet, OGM in BPD is predictive for depression symptom severity and trauma symptom severity at six-month follow-up (Chapter 6), and we found a negative correlation between OGM and the variety of non-suicidal self-injurious methods used (Chapter 7). Therefore, we suggest that BPD patients, as depressed and traumatised patients, may benefit from therapeutic strategies aimed at increasing memory specificity. With respect to vantage perspective, we found that (a) depressed state in BPD is unrelated to the proportion of observer memories retrieved; and (b) that BPD patients with PTSD more often adopt an observer perspective, also when retrieving non-traumatic memories (observer memory retrieval style; Chapter 4). In a non-clinical sample, we found that higher levels of observer memories (following high discrepant cues) were associated with more interpersonal and anxious-neurotic BPD complaints (Chapter 5). Finally, we developed two methods to study the impact of self-discrepancy on the AM characteristics of interest. Using novel indices, we found that self-discrepancy was negatively associated with memory specificity in depressed BPD patients (Chapter 3). However, using self-discrepant cues, we failed to replicate these findings. Also, prompting self-discrepancy had no effect on the vantage point used during recall (Chapter 4).
We conclude that the current theories on AM organisation seem to apply insufficiently to BPD. We consider how the patterns observed in BPD patients with respect to OGM and vantage point during recall may be explained by emotional dysregulation and identity disturbance, both characteristic for BPD, and we reflect on the validity of the methods used to investigate the role of self-discrepancy. Finally, clinical implications and directions for future research are discussed (Chapter 8).
... Thought suppression is the tendency to avoid cognitions viewed as intrusive or unwanted, because they are depressing, anxiety-producing, traumatic, or considered socially inappropriate (Wegner and Zanakos 1994). Paradoxically, thought suppression results in increased frequency of the unwanted thoughts, which subsequently increases the emotional distress attached to the thoughts by virtue of higher exposure (Muris et al. 1996;Wegner and Zanakos 1994). Alternatively, when thoughts are not the object of suppression attempts, they naturally decay on their own and with them, the distress that they caused (Muris et al. 1996). ...
... Paradoxically, thought suppression results in increased frequency of the unwanted thoughts, which subsequently increases the emotional distress attached to the thoughts by virtue of higher exposure (Muris et al. 1996;Wegner and Zanakos 1994). Alternatively, when thoughts are not the object of suppression attempts, they naturally decay on their own and with them, the distress that they caused (Muris et al. 1996). ...
... Tolerating negative inner experience such as distressing thoughts may serve as an exposure-based practice, resulting in desensitization and thereby reduction of the distress associated with such thoughts (Baer 2003). Incidentally, this lowered distress may reduce urges to engage in thought suppression, which would allow the natural process of thought extinction, thereby further reducing the distress associated with negative thoughts (Muris et al. 1996). Applied to body satisfaction, overall higher mindfulness should result in habituation to distressing appearance thoughts and therefore be associated with fewer attempts to suppress these thoughts, thereby leading to lower thought frequency. ...
Mindfulness is the tendency to pay attention, on purpose and in an open and non-judgmental way, to internal experiences such as thoughts, emotions, and sensations. Higher dispositional mindfulness is associated with higher body satisfaction, but the mechanism of this association remains unclear. In the present study, thought suppression was tested as a mediator of the association between mindfulness and body satisfaction in five models, each using one of the five mindfulness facets identified by Baer et al. (Assessment 13:27–45, 2006) as predictors. Five alternative models also were tested with thought suppression as the predictor and with the five mindfulness facets as mediators. Participants (N = 234) completed online measures of mindfulness, thought suppression, and body satisfaction. Observing was neither directly nor indirectly associated with body satisfaction. Results suggest a bi-directional association between thought suppression and the facets describing and acting with awareness, in their association with body satisfaction. The association between non-judging and body satisfaction was not mediated, suggesting that this facet may apply not only to negative appearance thoughts but also to appearance as the object of these thoughts. Non-reactivity was associated with higher body satisfaction only through low thought suppression. In terms of the prevention and treatment of body dissatisfaction, our results suggest that training in describing and acting with awareness may naturally entrain low thought suppression and vice versa. Training in non-judgment may directly result in lowering negative appearance judgment, thus improving body satisfaction. However, training in non-reactivity to distressing appearance thoughts may require concurrent training in the management of these thoughts to ultimately improve body satisfaction.
... (Foa et al., 1999). White Bear Suppression Inventory (Muris et al., 1996;Wegner & Zanakos, 1994). The White Bear Suppression Inventory (WBSI) is a 15-item self-report questionnaire used to measure people's tendency to suppress negative thoughts. ...
... Participants responded on a 5-point scale demonstrating their agreement ("1" strongly disagree to "5" strongly agree) with statements such as There are things I prefer not to think about, where higher scores indicate greater suppression. The scale has good internal validity (α = .94 in the present study) and test-retest reliability (0.80; Muris et al., 1996). ...
General Audience Summary
Prospective memory (PM)—memory for actions to be completed in the future or memory for intentions—is essential to our everyday functioning, yet failures of PM are common in the general population. Such errors are even more common in clinical samples, such as people with obsessive–compulsive disorder, schizophrenia, and depression. Recent research suggests posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) might also belong on this list. In fact, in a general, nonclinical population (i.e., university students), people who reported more severe PTSD symptoms also reported making more PM errors in their everyday life (e.g., forgetting to make phone calls, attend appointments, or put on deodorant). But, this research in a general sample did not test people’s actual PM performance (e.g., actually forgetting to make phone calls or attend appointments), which we know might differ from the way people report their memory errors. In the current research, we asked nonclinical participants to again self-report on their everyday PM errors, but we also asked them to complete two PM tasks in the lab (i.e., remember to press a certain key when a certain word appears on the screen or when a certain period of time elapses). We found that participants who reported worse PTSD symptom severity also self-reported more everyday PM errors. However, we did not find the same relationship between symptoms and participants’ lab-based PM performance. We also found no relationship between self-reported PM and actual performance. We propose that these tasks represent different components of PM and might be biased by a number of factors (e.g., preexisting negative beliefs biasing self-report). Although further research is needed, we suggest neither type of measurement should be used independently.
... The original version of the WBSI is used as a measure to identify individuals who chronically tend to suppress unwanted thoughts. In fact, a vast body of studies have indicated that the WBSI allows for the assessment of symptoms of psychopathological units such as obsessive-compulsive, depressive or anxiety symptoms [1,[18][19][20]. In addition, the results obtained on the WBSI scale also allow to diagnose a wide range of self-reported psychopathological symptoms, for instance, measured with the SCL-90 [19], or to diagnose personality traits such as neuroticism, trait-anxiety as well as a tendency to general worry [18]. ...
... In fact, a vast body of studies have indicated that the WBSI allows for the assessment of symptoms of psychopathological units such as obsessive-compulsive, depressive or anxiety symptoms [1,[18][19][20]. In addition, the results obtained on the WBSI scale also allow to diagnose a wide range of self-reported psychopathological symptoms, for instance, measured with the SCL-90 [19], or to diagnose personality traits such as neuroticism, trait-anxiety as well as a tendency to general worry [18]. ...
Objectives:
The main aim of this study was to adapt a Polish version of the White Bear Suppression Inventory (WBSI), originally created by Wegner and Zanakos (1994) to measure chronic suppression.
Methods:
The Polish version of the WBSI was prepared following the back-translation procedure. The scale was administered to 246 individuals from general population. Then, factor structure analysis of the WBSI was conducted. Finally, reliability analysis of the Polish version of the WBSI and its two sub-scales was done.
Results:
The Polish version of the WBSI yielded satisfactory psychometric properties. The results from the explanatory factor analysis indicated a two-factor structure of the WBSI inventory including factorsof 'suppression' and 'intrusions'. The psychological measures with both factors as well as measures based on the total WBSI scores show very high reliability.
Conclusions:
The reliability of the Polish version of the WBSI is comparable to the original version. The analysis allowed us to identify a new subscale that may represent the experience of intrusions. The Polish version of the WBSI is characterized by good psychometric properties and may be used to assess intrusions and suppression.
... And, like RNT, TS is a cognitive coping mechanism that may initially be helpful as it reduces the presence of unwanted cognitions in the short term. However, it can become problematic in the long term if used habitually in response to distressing thoughts or if it generalizes to inappropriate contexts (Abramowitz et al. 2001;Carver et al. 1989;Magee et al. 2012;Wegner et al. 1987) because TS provides only temporary relief from the unwanted thoughts and emotions they elicit (Muris et al. 1996). In fact, the intention to suppress an unwanted thought initiates a cognitively demanding thought-monitoring process that may actually increase the frequency of the unwanted thoughts as attention is drawn to those thoughts as a confirmation that they are (or are not) occurring (Wegner and Zanakos 1994). ...
... Participants rate the degree to which they feel the items apply to themselves on a scale from 1 (strongly disagree) to 5 (strongly agree). The total score's internal consistency (α = 0.89), temporal stability (r = 0.8, p < 0.001), and predictive validity have been demonstrated in clinical samples (Muris et al. 1996). ...
Affect intolerance (AI), one’s perceived sensitivity to, and intolerance of, unpleasant emotional states, is a risk and maintenance factor of affective disorders. To cope with AI, individuals may rely on maladaptive emotion regulation techniques that provide quick, but short-lived, relief from distress. Two cognitively based maladaptive emotion regulation strategies—repetitive negative thinking (RNT) and thought suppression (TS)—reflect contrasting attempts to cope with unwanted emotions. The present study sought to simultaneously examine the relationships between AI, maladaptive cognitive emotion regulation strategies, and symptoms of mood and anxiety disorders using structural equation modeling. Data from a community sample (N = 590) was used to assess the relationship between an empirically derived latent AI factor and symptoms of depression, anxiety, and obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). This latent AI factor demonstrated indirect effects on depression symptoms via RNT (β = 0.212, p = 0.039) and on OCD symptoms via RNT (β = 0.197, p = 0.021) and TS (β = 0.171, p = 0.001). There were no indirect effects of the latent factor on anxiety symptoms. These results suggest that elevated AI is associated with greater psychological symptoms via the use of maladaptive cognitive emotion regulation strategies, and that this relationship differs by symptom type.
... The WBSI has been found to have good internal consistency. 54 Higher WBSI scores indicate greater utilization of thought suppression. Further, the WBSI has been shown to have good predictive and convergent validity. ...
... Further, the WBSI has been shown to have good predictive and convergent validity. 54 Cronbach α for the WBSI was 0.87. ...
Objectives:
The Communal Coping Model suggests that pain catastrophizing may serve to elicit support from others. What is not known is how emotional regulation, namely emotional inhibition, impacts pain catastrophizing within the context of an interpersonal relationship. Individuals who have a greater tendency to emotionally inhibit may have a greater likelihood to use catastrophizing as a means for seeking support, particularly in relationships characterized by satisfaction and emotional validation.
Methods:
Data were collected from 50 undergraduate couples at the University of Michigan-Dearborn. Participants were videotaped during completion of an acute pain cold pressor task and completed measures involving pain catastrophizing, emotional inhibition, and relationship dynamics (i.e. AEQ, WBSI, DAS). In addition, the videotaped interactions were coded for both invalidation/validation and overt expressions of pain catastrophizing.
Results:
Emotional inhibition, and both validation and invalidation, were associated with pain catastrophizing. Observed validation and invalidation were not, however, directly associated with relationship satisfaction. Hierarchical linear regression showed a significant interaction between thought suppression and relationship satisfaction to predict pain catastrophizing.
Discussion:
Results show relationship satisfaction moderates the association between pain catastrophizing and thought suppression in a manner in which couples with high levels of relationship satisfaction who also engage in thought suppression are more likely to use pain catastrophizing as a cognitive strategy to elicit support. This study offers direction into treatment, and suggests that couples based cognitive-behavioral treatments that aim to utilize adaptive cognitive and behavioral coping strategies as well as emotional exploration and validation may be beneficial.
... Suppression of intrusive thoughts was previously assessed by the White Bear Suppression Inventory (WBSI), a self-report measure meant to evaluate the incidence of intentional avoidance of spontaneous unwanted thinking [9]. Brie y after, higher WBSI scores were found to be correlated with emotional vulnerability [10]. Yet, the WBSI did not consider the emotional and behavioral reactions to intrusive thoughts, but focused on coping strategies. ...
Background: Intrusive thoughts represent undesirable cognitive activity that can cause distress, and occurs in individuals with and without psychological disorders. In order to deal with unwanted interrupting thoughts, individuals might consciously stop the flow of such cognitions in an attempt to stop through suppression, or unconsciously avoid intrusive thoughts automatically through repression. This study aimed to psychometrically evaluate and validate the Arabic translation of the 7-item Emotional and Behavioral Reaction to Intrusions Questionnaire (EBRIQ) among a sample of Arabic-speaking adults.
Methods: Using the snowball sampling technique, participants (n=755) were adults from five Arab countries (Lebanon, United Arab Emirates, Egypt, Jordan, and Kuwait), who completed the Arabic translation of the Emotional and Behavioral Reaction to Intrusions Questionnaire. To examine the factor structure of the EBRIQ, we conducted a Confirmatory Factor Analysis using the data from the total sample.
Results: A total of 755 participants filled the survey. CFA indicated that fit of the one-factor model of EBRIQ scores was modest. Internal reliability was excellent (ω = .96; α = .96). No significant difference was found in terms of EBRIQ scores between males (M = 10.37, SD = 7.80) and females (M= 10.52, SD = 7.99) in the total sample, t(753) = -.22, p = .830. The highest EBRIQ scores were found in Jordanian participants (12.55 ± 6.94), followed by Emirati (12.23 ± 8.20), Lebanese (11.12 ± 7.69), Egyptian (8.96 ± 8.05) and Kuwaiti (8.20 ± 7.75) participants, F(4, 750) = 10.36, p < .001.
Conclusion: This study suggests that our Arabic translation of the EBRIQ is psychometrically proven to be reliable for use. This validated tool will allow researchers and practitioners to assess emotions and behaviors related to intrusive thoughts.
... WBSI is a Likert-type self-report scale to assess the tendency or effort to consciously suppress unwanted and disturbing thoughts. It was developed by Wegner and Zanakos in 1994 and its psychometric properties were tested by Muris et al. [60]. It does not evaluate to what extent the person has achieved this action. ...
... WBSI is a Likert-type self-report scale to assess the tendency or effort to consciously suppress unwanted and disturbing thoughts. It was developed by Wegner and Zanakos in 1994 and its psychometric properties were tested by Muris et al. [60]. It does not evaluate to what extent the person has achieved this action. ...
The use of social media is increasing worldwide, and thus, some new problems that negatively affect life are coming to the fore. The “White Bear Thought Suppression” problem, which was put forward in previous years, has re-emerged in the digital environment as psychological disorders accompanying excessive social media use. The reason for this study was that people constantly think about what is happening on social media, cannot distinguish between digital and reality, and cannot manage their mental process. The aim of this study is to examine the relationship between social media addiction and White Bear Thought Suppression and the factors affecting it from the perspective of White Bear Suppression on social media. The sample of the research consists of 356 volunteer participants in Turkey between the ages of 18-71. The research was conducted by analyzing the data collected with the Social Media Addiction Scale (SMAS) and White Bear Suppression Inventory (WBSI) scales in accordance with the quantitative method. Some of the results obtained in the research are as follows: (a) Women’s social media addiction and White Bear Suppression were found to be high, (b) Generation Z is the generation in which social media addiction and White Bear Suppression are seen at the highest level, (c) As daily social media use increases, the level of social media addiction and White Bear Suppression increases; (d) The frequency of opening live chats and having more than one profile increases social media addiction and White Bear Suppression. (e) The frequency of sleep disorders and perceived loneliness affect both phenomena. At the end of the research, it was emphasized that social media impacted White Bear Suppression and that new clinical studies were needed, especially with young people.
... Internal consistency in the current study (α = 0.93) is consistent with previous research (e.g., Muris et al., 1996). ...
Borderline personality disorder (BPD) has been linked separately to several forms of repetitive negative thinking and thought control. The purpose of the current study was to investigate these constructs together to better understand how BPD is linked to the engagement in repetitive thinking and thought control styles. Oversampling for BPD symptoms, the current study utilized a college student sample (N = 175; 74.0% female; mean age 21.10; 77.9% Caucasian) who completed measures to assess BPD, four types of repetitive negative thinking (i.e., anger rumination, sadness rumination, worry, catastrophizing), and three types of thought control strategies (i.e., thought suppression, brooding, and reflection). A series of path analyses were conducted. Results demonstrated that BPD directly predicted catastrophizing, worry, anger rumination, sadness rumination, and thought suppression, indirectly predicted thought suppression through worry, indirectly predicted brooding through all four types of RNT, and indirectly predicted reflection through anger and sadness rumination. Future research is needed to identify other potential negative thinking styles and thought control strategies that may be influencing the presentation of BPD and which of these dysregulated and maladaptive cognitive constructs may be transdiagnostic in nature. Investigating the link between thinking styles and thought control strategies provides a more in-depth and nuanced understanding of how they are linked with BPD, and this may be information for cognitive-focused treatment strategies and techniques.
... Participants provide a rating on each item on a scale from 1 (Strongly Disagree) to 5 (Strongly Agree). The WBSI has demonstrated good test-retest reliability (Wegner & Zanakos, 1994) as well as strong convergent validity with measures of intrusive thoughts (Muris, Merckelbach, & Horselenberg, 1996). ...
Objective:
In most countries, men are at higher risk than women for suicide death. Research focused on masculinity and men's mental health increasingly demonstrates that relationships between gender and various health outcomes, including suicidality, is complex as these relationships can be further explained by certain psychological processes or health behaviors. The objective of this study was to extend this area of research in a national sample of US men (n = 785) by investigating if their adherence to certain hegemonic masculine gender role norms (toughness and self-reliance through mechanical skills) is associated with the suppression of distressing thoughts and if thought suppression then increases their risk for suicidal thoughts and behaviors.
Methods:
Men in the US who have recently experienced a stressful life event completed an anonymous online survey. Structural Equational Modeling (SEM) was used to test for direct and indirect effects (i.e., mediation) between variables.
Results:
Men's engagement in thought suppression mediated the relationship between self-reliance and suicidality. The norm of toughness was both directly related to suicidality and mediated by thought suppression.
Conclusions:
Thought suppression appears to be a process that provides some explanation for the relationships between hegemonic masculine norms and suicidality in men, though this study indicated it may play only a small role. Research continues to build that certain masculine norms, such as self-reliance and toughness, are particularly concerning for men's health.HIGHLIGHTSMen's thought suppression mediates the relationship between self-reliance and suicidalityMen's toughness impacts suicidality both directly and via engagement in thought suppressionThese findings have implications for interventions that help men manage distressing thoughts.
... The first paper exposing the problems with the White Bear Suppression Inventory was Blumberg's 2000 paper titled "The white bear suppression inventory: revisiting its factor structure". Contrary to the only two studies on the reliability and validity of the WBSI available in 2000 (Wegner and Zanakos, 1994;Muris et al., 1996), which pointed out the presence of only one factor, Blumberg administered the questionnaire to 935 undergraduate students at the University of Texas at Austin, split the sample into two groups to allow exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses, and conducted maximum likelihood factor analyses, finding that there are three factors, not just one: unwanted intrusive thoughts, thought suppression, and self-distraction (to avoid thoughts) (Blumberg, 2000). ...
The flow of human thoughts is frequently plagued by unwanted cognitive activity, which has the unfortunate power to interfere with task performance, planning, social behaviour, and many other aspects of our lives. Importantly, repetitive negative thoughts and memories play a major role in psychopathology and represent a fundamental transdiagnostic process which deserves experimental and clinical attention. Inhibitory deficits on the one hand and metacognitive beliefs on the other are thought to play a key role in maintaining intrusive repetitive memories and thoughts in a variety of mental health difficulties (Major Depressive Disorder, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder, Generalized Anxiety Disorder). This thesis argues against Daniel Wegner’s Ironic Process Theory (Chapter 1) and examines the impact of thought suppression on intrusive Autobiographical Memories with two studies: an fMRI study (Study 1, Chapter 2), and a behavioural study (Study 2, Chapter 3). These two studies represent the first attempt to employ the Autobiographical Think/No-Think task (ATNT), a novel version of the Think/No-Think task solely based on autobiographical memories provided by each participant. In particular, Study 1 investigates the neural correlates of the ATNT task using functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging, and Study 2 explores the introduction of trial-by-trial intrusion ratings in the ATNT task and considers the affective consequences of thought suppression using Skin Conductance Response (SCR). This thesis also probes for the first time the relationship between metacognitive beliefs, intrusive memories, and thought control abilities using the standard Think/No-Think paradigm and manipulating participants’ metacognitive beliefs about the usefulness and the uncontrollability of repetitive intrusive thinking (Study 3, Chapter 4). After a general discussion (Chapter 5), this thesis reflects on the philosophical and ethical implications of forgetting, from a personal, psychological, and historical point of view (Chapter 6).
... reliable measure of trait anxiety (Spielberger et al., 1983 correlates with measures of obsessive thinking, depression, anxiety (Wegner & Zanakos, 1994) and intrusive thoughts following experimentally directed thought suppression (Muris, Merckelbach & Horselenberg, 1996). ...
p>The value of information processing bias measures as predictors of emotional distress and intrusive thoughts in response to stress is reviewed. Three cognitive models of anxiety and relevant research on pre-attentive, attentional and interpretative biases for negative information in anxiety are discussed. Recent studies suggest that these measures may better predict vulnerability to emotional distress than traditional questionnaire measures of anxiety-proneness (e.g., MacLeod & Hagan, 1992). Prospective studies exploring cognitive predictors of intrusive thoughts are reviewed focusing mainly on thought suppression. No study has yet examined whether cognitive biases predict intrusive thoughts. An empirical study is then reported that aims to extend previous research in two ways. Firstly, the range of information-processing bias measures is extended to include an attention deployment task capable of assessing initial vigilance toward, and subsequent avoidance of, threatening stimuli. Secondly, outcome measures are extended to include both emotional distress and short- and long- term measures of intrusive thoughts. Distressing film excerpts were used as a stressor. Findings were that attentional avoidance of threat (at 1500 ms exposures) and initial attentional bias (emotional Stroop) correlated with emotional distress and intrusive thoughts respectively, on certain outcome measures. This was independent of questionnaire measures. Trait anxiety and thought suppression questionnaire measures were also correlated with some of the emotional and intrusive thought outcome measures independently of other measures. Further research is required before firm conclusions can be made about the role of cognitive biases in mediating vulnerability to emotional distress.</p
... Scores range from 15 to 75, with greater scores indicating greater thought suppression tendencies; a construct associated with indices of unhelpful emotion regulation such as EA (Hayes et al., 1996;Levin et al., 2018). The WBSI demonstrates good construct validity and adequate internal consistency (α = 0.89; Muris et al., 1996). Cronbach's alpha in the present sample was adequate (α = 0.91). ...
Background and Objectives
Meditation practices have been marketed broadly to ameliorate human suffering. As such, individuals may seek out and use meditation to control or manage unpleasant thoughts and emotions. Emotion and thought control research suggest that meditation used in this way may potentiate unpleasant private experiences and contribute to negative outcomes. We aimed to evaluate the function or purpose guiding meditation and its relations with anxiety, depression, and other indices of well-being.
Design and Methods
In a cross-sectional design, undergraduate meditators (N = 98) reported intentions guiding their meditation practice (i.e., experiential/emotional control or acceptance/openness) and completed an assessment battery.
Results
Most participants (58.2%) indicated using meditation to manage, control, or avoid difficult experiences. Participants using meditation with control-based intentions reported greater worry, anxiety, depression, negative affect, and lower mindfulness relative to their acceptance-guided counterparts. After controlling for level of anxiety, viewing anxiety as a problem increased the likelihood of using meditation with control-based intentions. Similar relations were observed between viewing stress as a problem and the likelihood of using meditation for experiential control.
Conclusions
Findings suggest that (a) how people meditate is significantly related to psychological distress and (b) highlight the importance of evaluating intentions guiding meditative practices, particularly in individuals struggling with unpleasant emotional or psychological experiences.
... The total score ranges from 15 to 75, where a higher score expresses a higher tendency to suppress thoughts. The reliability and validity of the WBSI has been shown to be satisfactory (Muris, Merckelbach, & Horselenberg, 1996;Wegner & Zanakos, 1994). In this study, the alpha was .93 at baseline, and the reliable change of the WBSI was 16.8 points. ...
Objective
An increase in psychological flexibility has been found to be associated with health behavior changes. Peer-led interventions have been advantageous in improving physical activity among individuals at health risk. This study aimed to discover whether an ACT-based peer-tutored online intervention can increase self-reported physical activity participation and psychological flexibility among adults with overweight.
Design
The study was a non-randomized longitudinal intervention study. The intervention participants (N = 177) were primary health care clients with overweight. They participated in a 24-month program provided by health services, including three online modules of ACT of six week each, and tutoring by trained peers via five group meetings and four phone calls.
Main outcome measures and results
Physical activity participation was measured with Kasari’s FIT index concerning the frequency, intensity and time of the physical activity. Psychological flexibility was measured with AAQ-II, and thought suppression, as a dimension of psychological flexibility, with WBSI. Measures were taken at baseline, and at 6, 12, and 24 months. The statistical analysis was conducted with Mplus to identify latent groups with similar change patterns of physical activity, and to examine differences between the profiles. Two change profiles for physical activity participation were found: Low and High. At baseline in High profile group, physical activity and psychological flexibility were higher and thought suppression was lower than they were in Low profile group, as was expressing other psychological symptoms measured by DASS. During the intervention, physical activity increased significantly only within Low profile (within Cohen’s d = .48). Psychological flexibility (AAQ-II) increased within High profile (within Cohen’s d = .34), and thought suppression (WBSI) decreased in both profiles (within Cohen’s d = .33).
Conclusion
The ACT-based peer-tutored online intervention was promising especially for participants with low physical activity participation.
... Good internal consistency (α = 0.73-0.89) was reported for this inventory in the past studies (Wegner and Zanakos, 1994;Muris et al., 1996). In the current study, high level of internal consistency was computed for this questionnaire (α = 0.93). ...
Background: Past research has highlighted the role of trauma in social adjustment problems, but little is known about the underlying process. This is a barrier to developing effective interventions for social adjustment of traumatized individuals. The present study addressed this research gap through a cognitive model.
Methods: A total of 604 young adults (aged 18–24; living in Australia) from different backgrounds (refugee, non-refugee immigrant, and Australian) were assessed through self-report questionnaires. The data were analyzed through path analysis and multivariate analysis of variance. Two path analyses were conducted separately for migrant (including non-refugee and refugee immigrants) and Australian groups.
Results: Analyses indicated that cognitive avoidance and social problem solving can significantly mediate the relation between trauma and social adjustment (p < 0.05). The model explaining this process statistically fit the data (e.g., NFI, TLI, CFI > 0.95). According to the model, reacting to trauma by cognitive avoidance (i.e., chronic thought suppression and over-general autobiographical memory) can disturb the cognitive capacities that are required for social problem solving. Consequently, a lack of effective social problem solving significantly hinders social adjustment. There were no significant differences among the Australian, non-refugee immigrant and refugee participants on the dependent variables. Moreover, the hypothesized links between the variables was confirmed similarly for both migrant (including refugee and non-refugee immigrants) and Australian groups.
Conclusion: The findings have important implications for interventions targeting the social adjustment of young individuals. We assert that overlooking the processes identified in this study, can hinder the improvement of social adjustment in young adults with a history of trauma. Recommendations for future research and practice are discussed.
... The total score, ranging from 15 to 75, is obtained by summing the scores for the individual items, with higher scores indicating greater tendencies to suppress thoughts. The measure has good reliability and validity (Muris, Merckelbach, & Horselenberg, 1996). In this sample, Cronbach's α was .92. ...
Objectives: The objective of the present study was to investigate whether an acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT)-based web-intervention (Group 1, CareACT), or a standardized rehabilitation in a rehabilitation center (Group 2) was effective in enhancing the psychological well-being of family caregivers aged 60 and over compared to support provided by voluntary caregiver associations (Group 3).
Methods: Altogether, 149 family caregivers participated in this quasi-experimental study. Primary outcome measure was depression. Secondary outcomes included anxiety, sense of coherence, quality of life, psychological flexibility, experiential avoidance, and thought suppression. The questionnaires were administered at baseline, and four, and 10 months post-measurement. We investigated differences in the changes between the groups using Mplus modeling techniques.
Results: Regarding the main outcome of depression, the results suggest that the CareACT intervention was superior to standardized rehabilitation and to the support given by caregiver associations at four months, both showing a medium-sized difference between the groups. However, the change from four to 10 months post-intervention was not significantly different between these groups (d = 0.32–0.36). Thought suppression showed a significantly different change between the three groups from baseline to four months and to 10 months post-measurement (p = .038).
Conclusions: Web-based ACT may have beneficial effects on depressive symptoms and thought suppression in older caregivers.
Clinical implications: Web-based ACT could be a feasible alternative to institutional rehabilitation and support provided by voluntary caregiver associations. Web-based ACT responds flexibly to the needs of caregivers and provides them an opportunity for learning new skills to promote well-being.
... Participants respond to five statements (e.g., "I find it helpful to set goals for the near future"; α = .72 in the current study) on a Likert scale describing how much each statement is representative of themselves from '1' (not at all) to '4' (a lot). Muris, Merckelbach, & Horselenberg, 1996;Wegner & Zanakos, 1994).. We used this 15-item questionnaire to measure the maladaptive strategy of not thinking about the trauma (α = .96 ...
Introduction
PTSD sufferers often have problems with remembering the past, but do they also have trouble remembering tasks to be completed in the future? We argue characteristics of PTSD—such as negative appraisals and maladaptive strategies—might contribute to biased reporting of prospective memory failures among PTSD sufferers—or people with severe PTSD symptoms—within a general population.
Methods
Mechanical Turk participants completed a questionnaire battery measuring self-report prospective memory, PTSD symptoms, negative appraisals and maladaptive strategies (e.g., suppression), and depression, anxiety and stress symptoms.
Results
PTSD symptom severity positively correlated with self-report prospective memory failures (rs = .42–49). PTSD symptoms affected self-report prospective memory via their influence on negative appraisals and maladaptive strategies.
Limitations
Our findings rely on self-report, therefore we do not know if this relationship generalizes to objective prospective memory tasks.
Conclusions
Our data provide preliminary evidence for a relationship between PTSD symptomatology and subjective prospective memory in the general population and suggest that the negative appraisals and maladaptive strategies that commonly accompany PTSD might underpin this relationship.
... (d) White Bear Suppression Inventory (WBSI; Wegner & Zanakos, 1994) is a 15-item measure of failures to suppress thoughts. The scale has very good reliability and validity (Muris, Merckelbach, & Horselenberg, 1996). In the present study, the internal consistency of the WBSI as measured by Cronbach's α was 0.72. ...
It is well documented that women have an increased risk of emotional disorders, such as anxiety and depression. Such disorders are typically characterized by intrusive memories and rumination of past events, but findings are mixed as to whether women have enhanced access to memories of emotional events. Some studies have found that women, compared with men, report more frequent and more intense memories of emotionally stressful events, whereas other studies have failed to replicate this effect. These conflicting findings may reflect the use of different memory sampling techniques (e.g., retrospective vs. experimental data) and limited control for factors associated with both gender and emotional memory. The purpose of the present study was to investigate gender differences in memory for emotionally negative events, using three different sampling methods, while at the same time controlling for parameters that might co-vary with gender. Consistent with some previous studies, we found that women and men did not differ in their frequencies of emotionally negative involuntary memories. However, women rated their memories as more intense and arousing than men did, and women also reported higher increases in state anxiety after retrieval. Female gender accounted for unique variance in the emotional intensity and subjective arousal associated with negative memories, when controlling for other theoretically derived variables. The findings provide evidence that female gender is associated with a stronger emotional response to memories of negative events, but not that women remember such events more frequently than men do.
... Agree or Strongly Agree), were summed. WBSI has previously demonstrated good psychometric properties (Muris, Merckelbach, & Horselenberg, 1996) and has been used with non-western samples (e.g. Altin & Gencöz, 2009). ...
Background: Emotion regulation difficulties are common among individuals from refugee backgrounds. Little is known, however, about whether there are specific patterns relating to the types of emotion regulation strategies commonly employed by refugees, nor how this relates to psychopathology. Moreover, wider literature on emotion regulation has primarily focused on examining specific emotion regulation strategies in isolation, rather than patterns of emotion regulation across multiple strategies.
Objective: The current study was the first to identify individual differences in patterns of habitual emotion regulation among refugees, and explore their unique associations with trauma exposure and PTSD symptoms.
Method: Levels of trait reappraisal and suppression were measured among 93 refugees, using the Emotion Regulation Questionnaire and the White Bear Suppression Inventory. A latent class analysis was conducted to identify distinct classes of participants based on differing levels of habitual engagement in reappraisal and suppression. The association between class membership and key variables indexing refugee experiences (e.g. trauma exposure) and psychopathology (e.g. PTSD symptoms and emotion dysregulation) were also examined.
Results: Latent class analysis revealed three distinct profiles of habitual emotion regulation: a high regulators class (55.7%; high trait reappraisal/high trait suppression), an adaptive regulators class (23.6%; high trait reappraisal/moderate trait suppression), and a maladaptive regulators class (20.6%; low trait reappraisal/high trait suppression). Each class evidenced unique relations with trauma exposure and psychopathology. Compared to adaptive regulators, maladaptive regulators had more PTSD symptoms, experienced greater emotion dysregulation, and were more likely to be female, while high regulators had experienced more types of traumatic events.
Conclusions: This study identified distinct patterns of emotion regulation among refugees. Our findings demonstrate the importance of measuring multiple strategies to uncover patterns of emotion regulation and better understand the links between emotion regulation and psychopathology, which has important implications for the development of effective treatment with traumatized refugees.
... and depression (r = .54; Muris, Merckelbach, & Horselenberg, 1996). Given that the current study also found that this measure is related to decreased mental health (r = -.61), this demonstrates similar validity using an abbreviated version of the WBSI. ...
The present study examined the relationship between the self-reported personal impact of the election of President Donald J. Trump, as measured by the Personal Impact of the Election Scale (PIES), and physical and mental health. A sample of 299 MTurk Amazon workers completed an online survey, including measures of the perceived personal impact of the 2016 presidential election, thought suppression, and mental and physical health. A mediation model was tested, with thought suppression included as a mediator of the relationship between the PIES and physical and mental health. Results indicated that thought suppression partially mediated the relationship between the PIES and physical and mental health. Specifically, the perceived impact of the election was positively associated with thought suppression (β = .51, SE = .01, p < .001), which was in turn negatively associated with physical health (β = -.25, SE = .44, p < .001) and mental health (β = -.50, SE = .47, p < .001). The results of this study suggest that perceptions of this sociopolitical event were related to the health of United States citizens and show a need for large-scale interventions to address this relationship, especially for those who feel threatened based on their ethnic or religious background.
... Items are rated on a 5-point Likert scale. The WBSI has been found to yield good psychometric properties including good convergent validity, including positive correlations with measures of obsessive thinking, depression, and general anxiety, and good reliability, including internal consistency and testretest reliability (Muris, Merckelbach, & Horselenberg, 1996;Weg- ner, & Zanakos, 1994). A number of studies have found a two-factor solution for the WBSI, with factors labeled Suppression and Intrusion ( Schmidt et al., 2009). ...
The purpose of this study was to examine the relevance of the mindfulness and thought suppression to scrupulosity, or religious obsessions. It was hypothesized that scrupulosity would be negatively associated trait mindfulness and positively associated with thought suppression. It was also hypothesized that thought suppression and mindfulness would mediate the association between scrupulosity and symptoms of obsessive–compulsive disorder (OCD). A survey-based study was conducted to test these hypotheses in a large, nonreferred sample. In particular, undergraduate university students completed a number of self-report measures, including the Pennsylvania Inventory of Scrupulosity (PIOS), the Five Facet Mindfulness Questionnaire- Short Form (FFMQ-SF), and the White Bear Suppression Inventory (WBSI) in exchange for extra credit. As anticipated, mindfulness was significantly associated with scrupulosity, with a particularly strong and negative association found between the PIOS and the nonjudging subscale of the FFMQ-SF. Further, thought suppression was found to be significantly and positively associated scores on the PIOS, with correlations in the moderate to strong range. Further, as anticipated, mindfulness and thought suppression mediated the relation between scrupulosity and thought suppression. Overall, the findings provide insight into the cognitive processes related to persistent and disruptive levels of scrupulosity.
... Total scores range from 15 to 75 with higher scores on the WBSI indicate greater tendencies to suppress thoughts. Studies show that the WBSI is a reliable and valid self-report instrument [37]. ...
Background
The rapid increase in the number of elderly family caregivers underlines the need for new support systems. Internet-delivered psychological interventions are a potential approach, as they are easy to access for family caregivers who are often homebound with their care recipient. This study examines the relative effectiveness of an internet-based acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT) intervention or a standardized institutional rehabilitation program, first, in reducing depressive symptoms, and second, in improving the well-being and quality of life of elderly family caregivers compared to a control group receiving support from voluntary family caregiver associations.
Methods
156 family caregivers aged 60 or more are studied in a quasi-experimental study design that compares three groups of family caregivers (Group 1; n = 65: a guided 12-week web-based intervention; Group 2, n = 52: a standardized institutional rehabilitation program in a rehabilitation center; Group 3, n = 39: support provided by voluntary caregiver associations). Data collection is performed at three time-points: pre-measurement and at 4 months and 10 months thereafter. Caregivers’ depressive symptoms as a primary outcome, and perceived burden, anxiety, quality of life, sense of coherence, psychological flexibility, thought suppression, and personality as secondary outcomes are measured using validated self-report questionnaires. Physical performance and user experiences are also investigated. Between-group differences in the effects of the interventions are examined using multiple-group modeling techniques, and effect-size calculations.
Discussion
The study will compare the effectiveness of a novel web-based program in reducing depressive symptoms and improving the psychological well-being of elderly family caregivers, or a standardized institutional rehabilitation program representing usual care and a control group receiving support offered by voluntary caregiver associations. The results will expand the knowledge base of clinicians and provide evidence on effective strategies to improve the mental health and overall quality of life of elderly family caregivers.
Trial registration
The study was retrospectively registered in www.clinicaltrials.gov (ClinicalTrials.gov Identifier: NCT03391596 on January 4, 2018.
... Another limitation is that chronic trait suppression was based on self-report. However, the WBSI has been widely used to measure chronic thought suppression use, has good psychometric properties (Muris et al., 1996), and has been validated across cultural groups (Altin and Gençöz, 2009). A third limitation of the study is that it did not include a component to probe suppression strategies used by participants. ...
Previous work has shown that healthy individuals can actively suppress emotional memories through recruitment of the lateral prefrontal cortex. By contrast, individuals with posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) frequently experience unwanted memories of their traumatic experiences, even when making explicit efforts to avoid them. However, little is known regarding the behavioral and neural effects of memory suppression among individuals with PTSD. We examined memory suppression associated with PTSD using the Think-No-Think paradigm in an event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study. We studied three groups: PTSD (n=16), trauma exposure without PTSD (n=19), and controls (i.e., no trauma exposure or PTSD; n=13). There was a main effect of memory suppression such that participants remembered fewer face-picture pairs during the suppress condition than the remember condition. However, trauma-exposed participants (regardless of PTSD status) were less likely to successfully suppress memory than non-trauma-exposed controls. Neuroimaging data revealed that trauma-exposed individuals showed reduced activation in the right middle frontal gyrus during memory suppression. These results suggest that trauma exposure is associated with neural and behavioral disruptions in memory suppression and point to the possibility that difficulty in active suppression of memories may be just one of several likely factors contributing to the development of PTSD.
... Thought suppression has also been established as a dispositional, trait-like construct in relation to various forms of spontaneous cognition implicated in emotional disorders, 1 3 such as obsessions, intrusive memories, and worries (Aldao & Nolen-Hoeksema, 2010;Clark & Beck, 2010;Muris, Merckelbach, & Horselenberg, 1996). This is not surprising as, in their initial model, Wegner and Zanakos (1994) had proposed that thought suppression may be targeting distressing thoughts. ...
Involuntary mental time travel (MTT) refers to projecting oneself into the past or into the future without prior conscious effort. Previous studies have shown high inter-individual variability in the frequency of involuntary MTT, but few systematic studies exist. In three exploratory studies, we investigated the relation between individual differences in experiencing involuntary past and future MTT, and selected emotional and cognitive processes, with a special focus on thought suppression. Across all three studies, thought suppression emerged as a robust predictor of involuntary MTT above and beyond emotion-related variables, mind-wandering, daydreaming styles, and demographic variables. Findings from Studies 1 and 2 showed that higher thought suppression consistently predicted both more frequent involuntary past and future MTT across an American and a Danish sample, whereas rumination and emotion regulation were less consistently related to involuntary MTT. In Study 3, thought suppression reliably predicted more frequent involuntary MTT, even when controlling for mind-wandering, as well as for positive and negative daydreaming styles, which were all related to greater involuntary MTT. Overall, the individual differences assessed showed similar relationships to the tendency for having past and future involuntary MTT, with the possible exception of daydreaming styles, which appeared more strongly related to future-directed involuntary MTT.
... T3 α = .95) and good test-retest reliability in previous research (Muris et al. 1996). ...
Rigorous study of the prevalence and functions of emotional responding to initial mindfulness training among meditation-naïve practitioners or clients is scarce, yet could be important for informing more personalized and effective delivery of mindfulness-based interventions. Accordingly, we modeled the function of emotional responding to initial mindfulness training on key outcomes of a 4-week mindfulness training intervention among N = 115 unselected meditation-naïve adults from the general community. We found that elevations and deterioration in both negative and positive affect in the week following initial mindfulness training did not predict prospective intervention retention/dropout, nor key intervention outcomes. These tests were statistically powered to detect small to moderate effects. In contrast to this pattern of null prospective effects on intervention outcomes, we found that the greater the degree of early elevation in positive affect, the greater the prospective likelihood of cultivating higher levels of trait mindfulness over the course of the intervention. Findings indicate that elevations in negative affect and deterioration of positive affect, in early phases of mindfulness meditation training, were not linked to an iatrogenic effect of the intervention nor to elevated risk of dropout. Together, the present findings may contribute to the emerging discourse on safety and adverse effects of mindfulness meditation and inform decision-making with respect to the delivery of mindfulness-based interventions to improve well-being and reduce vulnerability in the general community.
... The WBSI is a 15-item scale designed to measure the tendency to suppress unwanted thoughts. Various studies have implied different factor structures underlying the WBSI; here, we used the subscales identified and used by Muris, Merckelbach, & Horselenberg (1996), assessing tendency to have intrusive thoughts (e.g., I have thoughts that I cannot stop) and thought suppression (e.g. I always try to put problems out of my mind). ...
Musical hallucinations (MH) account for a significant proportion of auditory hallucinations, but there is a relative lack of research into their phenomenology. In contrast, much research has focused on other forms of internally generated musical experience, such as earworms (involuntary and repetitive inner music), showing that they can vary in perceived control, repetitiveness, and in their effect on mood. We conducted a large online survey (N = 270), including 44 participants with MH, asking participants to rate imagery, earworms, or MH on several variables. MH were reported as occurring less frequently, with less controllability, less lyrical content, and lower familiarity, than other forms of inner music. MH were also less likely to be reported by participants with higher levels of musical expertise. The findings are outlined in relation to other forms of hallucinatory experience and inner music, and their implications for psychological models of hallucinations discussed.
... Each item is rated on a 5-point scale, with higher total scores indicating higher tendency for thought suppression. The scale has acceptable internal 7 consistency, high test-retest reliability, and concurrent validity with measures of depression, anxiety, and obsessions (Muris et al., 1996). ...
This research presents the Polish adaptation of the Acceptance and Action Questionnaire-II (AAQ-II). Results
collected from two samples (N1 = 602, N2 = 70) show stable structure, strong reliability and convergent, discriminant
and incremental validity. Cronbach’s alpha for the first sample was .938 [CI (.912; .958)] and for the
second .910 [CI (.874; .939)] with test-retest reliability r = .733 [CI (.602; .825)]. These results suggest that the
AAQ-II can be used as a measure of psychological flexibility in Poland. Moreover, the use of AAQ-II is free
of charge further facilitating its usage both in therapy and in research. The research also furthers knowledge
of the nature of psychological flexibility and effective coping. The results obtained support the discrepancy
between the functional assessment of avoidance as measured by the AAQ-II and topographically-categorized
examples of avoidance as measured by the Coping Inventory for Stressful Situations, with only the former having
a relation to overall functioning. The research shows that avoidant behaviors bear no meaningful relation
to the satisfaction with life or the presence of clinical issues, but they become an issue when they disconnect
the person from pursuing valued directions in life.
... The White Bear Suppression Inventory (WBSI; Wegner and Zanakos 1994) is a 15-item self-report inventory which assesses chronic thought suppression using a 5-point scale (1 = "strongly disagree" to 5 = "strongly agree"). Psychometric properties show good internal consistency (α = 0.89) (Muris et al. 1996). Factor analyses indicate that the 15-item scale consists of two related factors: the tendency to suppress thoughts, and the frequency of experiencing unwanted intrusive thoughts (e.g., Schmidt et al. 2009), indicating that a high frequency of intrusions does not necessarily equal a high level Table 1 Thought action fusion items, factor loadings and item-total correlation for second random half of the sample (n = 181) *These items were removed from the scale after exploratory factor analysis † Extracted factors correspond to uncontrollable (UC), self-suicidal (SS), and positive controllable (PC) ...
Although suicidal ideation is one of the most consistent symptoms across recurrent episodes of depression, the mechanisms underpinning its maintenance are poorly understood. In order to develop effective treatments for suicidally depressed patients, understanding what maintains suicidal distress is critical. We hypothesised that Thought–Action Fusion (TAF), i.e., to assume that having a thought has real world consequences, originally described in Obsessive–Compulsive Disorder, might be a bias in recurrently suicidally depressed people. To assess this, we revised the original TAF scale, and assessed TAF in three samples: healthy controls, recurrently depressed individuals with no history of suicidality (D-NS) and individuals with a history of recurrent suicidal depression (D-S). Exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses indicated a three-factor solution of TAF: (1) TAF for uncontrollable events, (2) self-suicidal TAF for suicidal acts related to oneself, and (3) TAF for positive controllable events. Compared to healthy controls, the D-NS group reported significantly higher total TAF, TAF uncontrollable, and TAF self-suicidal subscales, whilst positive controllable TAF was lower compared to healthy controls. Both D-S and D-NS samples reported higher TAF for suicidal thought compared to healthy controls, i.e., believing that having suicidal thoughts means they will act on them, however in the context of low mood this became more pronounced for the D-S group. These findings suggest that targeting TAF both in suicidal and non-suicidal depression has merit.
Electronic supplementary material
The online version of this article (10.1007/s10608-018-9924-7) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.
... Prior research examining repetitive negative thinking has focused predominantly on its association with rumination and worry, thus neglecting other potentially relevant aspects of repetitive thinking. For example, the tendency to experience difficult-to-remove intrusive thoughts is positively correlated with depression and anxiety (Muris, Merckelbach, & Horselenberg, 1996;Wegner & Zanakos, 1994). Furthermore, among an unselected sample of college students, individual differences in intrusive thoughts were systematically related to the difficulty with successfully regulating previously relevant but no-longer-relevant information in working memory in independent, emotionally neutral laboratory tasks (Friedman & Miyake, 2004). ...
Recent theoretical advances have emphasized the commonality between rumination and worry, often referred to as repetitive negative thinking. Although not studied extensively, repetitive negative thinking may not only account for a substantial overlap between depression and anxiety symptoms but also encapsulate other constructs including one’s tendency to experience unwanted intrusive thoughts or have low levels of mindfulness. In this study, 643 college students completed self-report questionnaire measures of repetitive negative thinking (the Habit Index of Negative Thinking) and other relevant constructs including rumination, worry, depression and anxiety symptoms, intrusive thoughts, and mindfulness.
To analyze the data, we conducted systematic commonality analyses, which algebraically decomposed shared variances among these measures into various unique components. Results in Study 1 indicated that individual differences in repetitive negative thinking were explained largely by the overlap between rumination and worry, but also by some rumination-specific and worry-specific variance. Moreover, the shared variation in rumination and worry explained the frequencies of depression and anxiety symptoms and their overlap. We also found in Study 2 that repetitive negative thinking was positively related to intrusive thoughts and negatively related to mindfulness. These associations were mostly explained by shared variance with rumination and worry, but there was also some mindfulness-specific variance. These results suggest that repetitive negative thinking may indeed lie at the core of the comorbidity between depression and anxiety symptoms, but that it is also a broader construct that encompasses intrusive thoughts and low levels of mindfulness.
... Responses were made on a 5-point scale from strongly disagree to strongly agree and higher scores indicated a greater tendency to experience CI (α = 93). Although this measure incorporates items related to behaviors undertaken to suppress unwanted or off-task thoughts, previous evidence reports that the WBSI reliably predicts greater frequency of unwanted intrusive thoughts (Muris, Merckelbach, & Horselenberg, 1996). ...
Objectives:
Response time inconsistency (RTI)-or trial-to-trial variability in speeded performance-is increasingly recognized as an indicator of transient lapses of attention, cognitive health status, and central nervous system integrity, as well as a potential early indicator of normal and pathological cognitive aging (Hultsch, Strauss, Hunter, & MacDonald, 2008; MacDonald, Li, & Bäckman, 2009). Comparatively, little research has examined personality predictors of RTI across adulthood.
Methods:
We evaluated the association between the personality trait neuroticism and RTI in a community-dwelling sample of 317 adults between the ages of 19 to 83 and tested for two indirect pathways through negative affect (NA) and cognitive interference (CI).
Results:
The personality trait neuroticism predicted greater RTI independent of mean response time performance and demographic covariates; the results were age-invariant. Furthermore, NA (but not CI) accounted for this association and moderated mediation model results indicated that older adults were more vulnerable to the adverse effects of NA.
Discussion:
Neuroticism predicts greater response time inconsistency irrespective of mean performance and this effect is driven largely by heightened negative emotionality that may be particularly detrimental for older adults.
... The researchers who have made this argument have relied largely on Freudian psychoanalytic theory (Freud, 1946;MacInnis & Hodson, 2015). Religious worldviews encourage individuals to publicly repress sexual desires, but just as suppressed thoughts often return unbidden (Muris, Merckelbach, & Horselenberg, 1996), so too might repressed sexual desires lead to a secret obsession with sexual material and behavior. This would explain not only why religious participants would be reluctant to report pornography use in their self-reports but also why more religious states appear to search more for sexual content on Google. ...
In a large online survey of undergraduates, we examined the degree to which social desirability concerns might bias pornography-related self-reports and whether these biases are stronger among highly religious participants than among less-religious ones. Recent state-level analyses have put forward a controversial suggestion that religious individuals tend to search for pornography more than their less-religious peers, despite self-reports to the contrary. Such results could be explained by a social-desirability bias against reporting the consumption of pornography, one that applies specifically to religious individuals. Though our findings are limited to undergraduates in the U.S. Midwest, we found some evidence that the desire to positively self-present (as measured by the Marlowe–Crowne social desirability scale) may bias reports of pornography consumption and perceptions of pornography’s effects (e.g., perceptions of addictiveness). However, contrary to popular sentiment—and our own hypotheses—we found no evidence for and much evidence against the suggestion that religious individuals have a more pronounced social desirability bias against the reporting of pornography consumption than the irreligious. Interaction terms assessing that possibility were either nonsignificant or significant in the reverse direction.
... to .57; Muris, Merckelbach, & Horselenberg, 1996). The internal consistency of this inventory in the current study was high (Cronbach's α = .90). e v e n t e m o t i o n r e g u l a t i o n , c e n t r a l i t y , a n d d e p r e s s i o n Ruminative Response Scale (RRS) A 22-item version of this widely used questionnaire (Nolen-Hoeksema, Larson, & Grayson, 1999) was employed to assess general tendencies to reflect (e.g., "Go away by yourself and think about why you feel this way") and to brood (e.g., "Think 'Why can't I get going?'") ...
Dispositional emotion regulation is related to the severity and maintenance of depressive symptoms. However, whether emotion regulation specific to an event highly central for an individual’s identity is predictive of depressive symptoms has not been examined. Non-clinical participants (N = 220) reported the extent to which they employed a selection of emotion regulation strategies when recalling low and high-centrality events. Dispositional emotion regulation and depressive symptoms were also assessed. A seven-week follow-up was conducted. High-centrality events were associated with more emotion regulation efforts. Greater brooding and expressive suppression in relation to high-centrality memories predicted concurrent depressive symptoms after controlling for event valence and dispostional emotion regulation. Effects were abscent for low-centrality memories. Emotion regulation in response to high-centrality memories did not predict depressive symptoms at follow up beyond baseline depressive symptoms. Overall the findings showed that maladaptive emotion regulation in response to memories of high-centrality events is important for explaining depressive symptomatology.
... ERQ: Emotion Regulation Questionnaire (Gross & John, 2003); BEQ: Berkeley Expressivity Questionnaire (Gross & John, 1997); CEQ: Carstensen Emotion Questionnaire (Carstensen, 2000); STAXI-2: State-Trait Anger Expression Inventory-2 (Spielberger, 1999); ARS: Anger Rumination Scale (Sukhodolsky, Golub, & Cromwell, 2001); WBSI: White Bear Suppression Inventory (Muris, Merckelbach, & Horselenberg, 1996). Table 4. Key Information for studies employing both self-report emotion regulation items and laboratory-based emotion regulation tasks. ...
Objectives: This review examines differences in the use of emotion regulation (ER) strategies among younger and older adults.
Method: A systematic review using search terms related to ageing and ER identified 23 relevant studies. Narrative synthesis was adopted to analyse the findings.
Results: Generally, greater use of situation selection and attentional deployment was identified among older adults, although these relationships were dependent on contextual/moderator variables. While older adults employed greater levels of situation modification in response to negative stimuli, there was considerable variation in age differences across specific situation modification subtypes. Available evidence pointed to an absence of age differences in the cognitive change strategy of cognitive reappraisal. The use of relatively less-cognitively demanding cognitive change subtypes (e.g. acceptance) was, under particular circumstances, greater among older adults. Findings regarding the response modulation strategy of expressive suppression were equivocal.
Conclusion: Adult development is not characterised by straightforward shifts in preferences for use of different ER strategies. Moderator variables appear to be of central importance in shaping the emergence of age differences in ER. Systematically examining interactions of age with individual difference variables and situational factors in samples including oldest-old adults will be important for advancing knowledge regarding developmental differences in ER.
The Oxford Handbook of Sport and Performance Psychology includes the latest research and applied perspectives from leaders in the field of performance psychology, presenting sport and performance psychology from myriad perspectives. It looks at individual psychological processes in performance such as attention, imagery, superior performance intelligence, motivation, anxiety, confidence, cognition, and emotion. Articles also consider the social psychological processes in performance including leadership, teamwork, coaching, relationships, moral behavior, and gender and cultural issues. The book further examines human development issues in performance, such as the development of talent and expertise, positive youth development, the role of the family, the end of involvement transitions, and both youth and masters-level sport and physical activity programs. Finally, the text looks at interventions in sport and performance psychology and counseling of performers in distress including such important issues for all performers as: appearance- and performance-enhancing drug use, injuries, managing pain, eating and weight issues, burnout, and the role of physical activity in maintaining health. The articles collected here also cover the history of sport and performance psychology; the scope and nature of the field; ethical issues in sport and performance psychology; performance psychology in the performing arts and other non-sporting fields; perfectionism and performance; the role of the performance coach and of the sport psychologist with a coach and team; supervision; and a look ahead to the future of the field.
Background: Substance use disorder (SUD) is a significant issue in the United States, characterized by chronic relapse following periods of abstinence. One of the primary precursors to relapse is craving. Findings from several studies have shown a negative association between trait mindfulness and craving in clinical samples; however, further research is needed to understand mechanisms underlying this relationship. Purpose/Objectives: The current study assessed thought suppression as a partial mediator of the relationship between trait mindfulness and craving. Methods: The current study used data from a previous randomized controlled trial of adults (N = 244) enrolled in community-based treatment for substance use disorder (SUD). Results: Analyses showed a significant moderate positive association between thought suppression and craving, a significant moderate negative association between thought suppression and trait mindfulness, and a significant moderate negative association between trait mindfulness and craving. Subsequent analyses confirmed a partial mediating role of thought suppression in the relationship between trait mindfulness and craving, indicating the inverse relationship between trait mindfulness and craving was partially explained by thought suppression. Conclusions/importance: These findings may inform treatment for SUD. Specifically, targeting thought suppression through mindfulness-based treatment approaches may be a mechanism through which craving can be reduced.
Extant research suggests a complex relationship between prospective memory (PM) and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) symptom severity. In a general population, this relationship exists for self-report assessment but not objective, in-lab PM performance (e.g., pressing a certain key at a particular time, or when particular words appear). However, both these measurement methods have limitations. Objective, in-lab PM tasks might not represent typical everyday performance, while self-report measurement might be biased by metacognitive beliefs. Thus, we used a naturalistic diary paradigm to answer the overarching question: are PTSD symptoms associated with PM failures in everyday life? We found a small positive correlation between diary-recorded PM errors and PTSD symptom severity ( r = .21). Time-based tasks (i.e., intentions completed at a particular time, or after a specified time has elapsed; r = .29), but not event-based tasks (i.e., intentions completed in response to an environmental cue; r = .08), correlated with PTSD symptoms. Moreover, although diary-recorded and self-report PM correlated, we did not replicate the finding that metacognitive beliefs underpin the PM-PTSD relationship. These results suggest that metacognitive beliefs might be particularly important for self-report PM only.
Suppression of unwanted thoughts may increase these thoughts, leading to stress and anxiety. The White Bear Suppression Inventory is a survey to assess thought suppression. In fact the White Bear Suppression Inventory has been correlated with other scales that measure intrusive thoughts as well as depression and anxiety. This scale is widely used, and has been translated into many languages. This scale may be useful to examine the impact of mindfulness interventions on thought suppression.
The purpose of this study was to develop and provide a preliminary validation of a new measure of scrupulosity, the Scrupulous Thoughts and Behaviours Questionnaire (STBQ). More specifically, the STBQ was designed to assess a range of scrupulosity-related thoughts/obsessions and behaviours/compulsions. Following item development, a sample of non-referred college students completed the STBQ along with numerous validation measures. Based on factor analyses, a two-factor solution was retained. The first factor consisted of items that measure scrupulosity-themed obsessions and thoughts, and the second factor consisted of items that measure scrupulosity-themed compulsions and related behaviours. Support was found for the validity of STBQ, as both subscales were significantly and positively associated with measures of relevant constructs, including the Pennsylvania Inventory of Scrupulosity-Revised, the only other self-report measure of scrupulosity, thought–action fusion, religiosity, and obsessive–compulsive disorder symptoms. As the first known self-report measure to assess scrupulosity obsessions and compulsions, the STBQ has a potential utility in clinical practice and research.
Background
Family caregivers often report high levels of distress, including depressive symptoms, anxiety, and reduced quality of life. There is a need for a greater understanding of the factors influencing, explaining, and maintaining psychological distress in family caregivers.
Aim
The aim of this study was to examine whether avoidance strategies such as thought suppression (WBSI), psychological inflexibility (AAQ-II), and, and caregiver experiential avoidance (EACQ) predict psychological distress (BDI-II, GAD-7) and quality of life (WHOQOL) in family caregivers aged 60 and over. We hypothesized that these avoidance strategies would explain elevated levels of psychological symptoms and lower quality of life.
Method
Altogether, 149 family caregivers aged 60 or over completed self-report measures of depressive symptoms, anxiety, quality of life, thought suppression, psychological inflexibility and caregiver experiential avoidance. We conducted correlation and regression analyses to assess the associations and the predictive ability of these constructs.
Results
Together, psychological inflexibility and thought suppression accounted for between 40 and 46% of the variance in the depression and anxiety outcomes and 15% of the variance in the physical domain of quality of life. Unwanted thoughts, the subcomponent of thought suppression, was strongly associated with symptoms of depression and anxiety, and with physical and psychological quality of life.
Conclusion
Thought suppression and psychological inflexibility played a significant role in explaining family caregivers’ symptoms of depression and anxiety. In addition, psychological inflexibility was significantly related to quality of life. This suggests the need for acceptance-based strategies to handle thought suppression and psychological inflexibility.
Non-suicidal self-injury (NSSI) and binge eating frequently co-occur. These behaviors are often used to alleviate distress. Previous studies examining this co-occurrence have used a variable-centered approach. The current study used a person-centered approach (mixture modeling) to examine how individuals cluster in groups based on their past month NSSI, past month objective and subjective binge episodes (OBEs and SBEs), and endorsement of coping motives for NSSI and eating in two large samples of emerging adults. Validators included self-report measures of emotion regulation, impulsivity, and negative affect. In Study 1, additional validators included lifetime history of mental health treatment and suicide attempts. In Study 2, additional validators included child abuse history. In both Study 1 and 2, a three-class solution provided the most interpretable fit with classes characterized as (1) low psychopathology; (2) the presence of OBEs and NSSI and endorsement of NSSI coping motives; and (3) the presence of SBEs and NSSI and endorsement of high levels of NSSI coping motives. In both studies, eating motives were equivalent in Classes 2 and 3, but NSSI motives were most strongly endorsed by Class 3. In Study 1, Class 2 endorsed higher rates of lifetime suicide attempts than Class 3. In Study 2, both Class 2 and 3 endorsed higher rates of child abuse than Class 1, although they did not differ from each other. The class structure and validator analysis were consistent across samples and measures. Results suggest that binge eating and NSSI tend to cluster together in otherwise healthy emerging adults.
Objective
Anxiety sensitivity cognitive concerns (ASCC), the fear of the consequences of mental dyscontrol, has been established as a risk factor for suicidal ideation (SI). Treatments targeted at reducing ASCC have been shown to reduce suicide risk. In this study, a new self-report measure, the Anxiety Sensitivity Index-3 Suicidal Cognition Concerns (ASI-3-SCC), was developed to assess sensitivity specifically to thoughts of suicide and wanting to die.
Method
Participants completed the new measure as well as measures of anxiety sensitivity, depressive symptoms, SI, and worst point SI. We hypothesized that the ASI-3-SCC would be associated with SI and worst point SI. Additionally, we hypothesized that the ASI-3-SCC would moderate the relationship between ASCC and SI.
Results
As predicted, the ASI-3-SCC was significantly associated with SI in the past two weeks and lifetime worst point SI after accounting for ASCC and depression. The ASI-3-SCC also moderated the relationship between ASCC and SI such that ASCC was related to SI at high levels of ASI-3-SCC.
Conclusions
We suggest that the interpretation of SI and feelings of wanting to die as dangerous may lead to more attention to those thoughts when they occur and increased psychological distress associated with those thoughts. This measure will allow researchers to measure a novel construct in the literature and further examine the impact of catastrophic interpretations of suicidal thoughts.
•
Highlights
• Created a new measure for sensitivity to thoughts of suicide and wanting to die.
• Suicidal cognition concerns associated with suicidal ideation in the past two weeks.
• Suicidal cognition concerns associated with lifetime worst point suicidal ideation.
• Suicidal cognition concerns moderated AS cognitive concerns and ideation relation.
The reliable and valid assessment of unwanted intrusive thoughts (UITs) is crucial. The main aim of the current research was to investigate if individuals who used a counter app (a program on a mobile device that is used to count the frequency of an event by pressing the volume-up button) to assess UITs retrospectively overreported the number of UITs. The secondary aim was to establish preliminary psychometric qualities of the counter app method. A UIT was activated in N = 87 students. They were randomly allocated to one of three experimental conditions: counter app, thought monitoring, or free thinking. Retrospective descriptors of the UIT, including its frequency, were taken. The second study (N = 118) mainly aimed to replicate the results of the first study. In both studies, the retrospective frequency ratings of the UITs were 2 to 3 times higher in individuals who had used the counter app compared to those in the control conditions. Preliminary indicators of convergent validity and test–retest reliability were good; criterion, discriminant, and predictive validity were unsatisfactory. To conclude, using event marking such as a counter app can result in an overestimation of UITs. Alternative methods of assessment of UITs are discussed.
Objective:
The fluid vulnerability theory of suicide posits that each person has a baseline risk for suicide, which is comprised of both stable and dynamic factors. The current study investigated the unique involvement of suicide-specific cognitions and attentional fixation on recent suicidal ideation (SI) and SI at its worst.
Method:
Data were analyzed from a sample of N = 126 undergraduate students with a history of SI. Path analyses were used to analyze the relationship between suicide-specific cognitions, attentional fixation, and SI (current and worst point).
Results:
Results revealed that suicide-specific cognitions were directly related to both recent SI and worst-point SI. Suicide-specific cognitions had a significant, indirect effect with worst-point SI through attentional fixation, but this effect was not significant when using recent SI.
Conclusion:
These data support the need for interventions to target cognitive contents and contexts (e.g., fixation) to reduce escalation of SI. Future work would benefit from replicating and extending results in studies that include prospective designs and the assessment of suicidal behaviors.
Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) is a principle-based behavioral intervention that addresses human suffering using mindfulness and acceptance techniques along with behavioral commitments linked to personal values. While ACT has been applied to a wide variety of problems, it is well suited to the treatment of trauma based on its processes specifically designed to reduce experiential avoidance, and it has only just begun to be investigated for its effectiveness with this population. Furthermore, current drop-out and refusal rates for exposure-based therapies, the main empirically supported intervention for the treatment of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), necessitate the development of alternatives. The current pilot studies evaluated a 12-session group ACT intervention with 10 veterans diagnosed with PTSD, and a 12-session individual ACT intervention with 9 veterans diagnosed with PTSD. Significant reductions in PTSD symptoms from pre to post or follow-up were found for both the group intervention (n = 10, g = 0.69) and the individual intervention (n = 9; g = 1.24). Decreases in thought suppression as well as increases in aspects of mindfulness and psychological flexibility were also found, but results were mixed and differed by the individual versus group intervention.
Recent data highlight maladaptive emotion regulation strategies as a transdiagnostic risk factor. Executive functioning (EF) is also conceptualized as a transdiagnostic mechanism. Drawing these two areas together, data supports the intervening role of rumination, a form of emotion regulation, in the EF-clinical symptomatology link. However, research has yet to fully examine various emotion regulation strategies as transdiagnostic mechanisms in youth. The relationship between EF components, emotion regulation strategies and transdiagnostic negative affect was examined. Set-shifting was associated with general emotion regulation difficulties as well as rumination, worry and thought suppression. Inhibition was only related to general emotion regulation difficulties and the brooding subtype of rumination. Finally, various forms of emotion regulation were observed to mediate the relationship between set-shifting and negative affect.
Badanie prezentuje wyniki polskiej walidacji Kwestionariusza Akceptacji i Działania-II (AAQ-II). Wyniki z dwóch prób (N1=602, N2=70) wskazują na stabilną strukturę, wysoką rzetelność oraz trafność zbieżną, różnicową i przyrostową. Alfa Cronbacha dla pierwszej próby wyniosła .938 [CI (.912; .958)], dla drugiej .910 [CI (.874; .939)]. Stabilność dwutygodniowa wyniosła r = .733 [CI (.602; .825)]. Wyniki wskazują na to, że AAQ-II może zostać wykorzystane w Polsce jako miara elastyczności psychologicznej. Ponadto, w przeciwieństwie do czołowych polskich testów psychologicznych, wykorzystanie AAQ-II jest bezpłatne, ułatwiając prowadzenie badań i psychoterapii. Badanie poszerza także wiedzę o istocie elastyczności psychologicznej oraz efektywnego radzenia sobie. Pozyskane dane wskazują na rozbieżność między funkcjonalną diagnozą AAQ-II a zorientowaną objawowo diagnozą kwestionariusza Coping Inventory for Stressful Situations, gdzie tylko pierwszy miał istotą statystycznie relację do ogólnego funkcjonowania. Badanie wskazuje, że zachowania unikowe nie wiążą się w znaczący sposób z satysfakcją z życia lub obecnością problemów klinicznych, ale zaczynają takimi być, gdy oddzielają osobę od realizowania własnych wartości i sensu życia.
In a first experiment, subjects verbalizing the stream of consciousness for a 5-min period were asked to try not to think of a white bear, but to ring a bell in case they did. As indicated both by mentions and by bell rings, they were unable to suppress the thought as instructed. On being asked after this suppression task to think about the white bear for a 5-min period, these subjects showed significantly more tokens of thought about the bear than did subjects who were asked to think about a white bear from the outset. These observations suggest that attempted thought suppression has paradoxical effects as a self-control strategy, perhaps even producing the very obsession or preoccupation that it is directed against. A second experiment replicated these findings and showed that subjects given a specific thought to use as a distracter during suppression were less likely to exhibit later preoccupation with the thought to be suppressed.
Whether the rebound effect of thought suppression would occur with self-generated intrusive thoughts and whether the rebound would be followed by negative metacognitions concerning one's ability to control one's thoughts were explored. In Exp 1, Ss (
N = 104) were asked to (1) suppress and then express or (2) express and then suppress their own intrusive thoughts during written stream-of-consciousness tasks. Results revealed the reverse of the rebound effect: Initial suppression was followed by diminished expression of the intrusive thoughts. Exp 2 (
N = 116) replicated the original rebound effect (D. M. Wegner, 1989) and showed that the rebound was followed by increased reports of feeling out of control of one's thoughts. But, once again, the rebound did not occur with Ss' own intrusive thoughts. Suppressing new thoughts may trigger the synthesis of obsession, but suppressing familiar thoughts in a new context may be less problematic. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
Examined the idea that thought suppression creates a unique bond between the suppressed item and one's mood state, such that the reactivation of one leads to the reinstatement of the other. In Exp 1, 112 college students who were induced by music to experience positive or negative moods reported their thoughts while trying to think or not think about a white bear. When all Ss were subsequently asked to think about a white bear, those who were in similar moods during thought suppression and later expression displayed a particularly strong rebound of the suppressed thought. In Exp 2, 84 Ss' moods following the expression of a previously suppressed or expressed thought were assessed. Analysis of the mood reports showed that Ss who had initially tried to suppress their thoughts experienced a reinstatement of the mood state that existed during the initial period of suppression. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
When a person tries to suppress a thought, environmental features are often used as distracters. This research examined whether such distracters later become reminders of the unwanted thought when suppression is discontinued — and so incline the individual who remains in the suppression environment to experience a rebound of preoccupation with the unwanted thought. Subjects were asked to think aloud and to signal with a bell ring any thoughts of white bears. They were directed either to think or not to think of white bears in one context (a slide show). When they were then invited to think about white bears in a different slide-show context, no appreciable rebound of white bear thoughts was found in the subjects who had initially suppressed. However, when they were issued the same invitation on return to the initial context, those who had initially suppressed showed a rebound of preoccupation.
We examined how the suppression of an exciting thought influences sympathetic arousal as indexed by skin conductance level (SCL). Subjects were asked to think aloud as they followed instructions to think about or not to think about various topics. Experiment 1 showed that trying not to think about sex, like thinking about sex, elevates SCL in comparison to thinking about or not thinking about less exciting topics (e.g., dancing). Experiment 2 revealed that the suppression of the thought of sex yielded SCL elevation whether or not subjects believed their think-aloud reports would be private or public, and it also revealed that the effect dissipated over the course of a few minutes. Experiment 3 found such dissipation again but showed that subsequent intrusions of the suppressed exciting thought are associated with further elevations in SCL over 30 min. Because such an association was not found when subjects were trying to think about the exciting thought, it was suggested that the suppression of exciting thoughts might be involved in the production of chronic emotional responses such as phobias and obsessive preoccupations.
We developed a multidimensional coping inventory to assess the different ways in which people respond to stress. Five scales (of four items each) measure conceptually distinct aspects of problem-focused coping (active coping, planning, suppression of competing activities, restraint coping, seeking of instrumental social support); five scales measure aspects of what might be viewed as emotional-focused coping (seeking of emotional social support, positive reinterpretation, acceptance, denial, turning to religion); and three scales measure coping responses that arguably are less useful (focus on and venting of emotions, behavioral disengagement, mental disengagement). Study 1 reports the development of scale items. Study 2 reports correlations between the various coping scales and several theoretically relevant personality measures in an effort to provide preliminary information about the inventory's convergent and discriminant validity. Study 3 uses the inventory to assess coping responses among a group of undergraduates who were attempting to cope with a specific stressful episode. This study also allowed an initial examination of associations between dispositional and situational coping tendencies.
In three experiments we examined depressed individuals' mental control abilities and strategies. Experiment 1 revealed that although depressed college students were initially successful in suppressing negative material, they eventually experienced a resurgence of unwanted negative thoughts. Analysis of subjects' stream-of-consciousness reports indicated that this resurgence was associated with the use of negative thoughts as distracters from the unwanted item. In Experiment 2 depressed subjects acknowledged that positive distracters were more effective than negative ones in suppressing negative thoughts. This acknowledgement suggests that depressed subjects in Experiment 1 did not deliberately focus on negative distracters but that those thoughts automatically occurred because they were highly accessible. Experiment 3 demonstrated that depressed subjects' use of positive distracters could be increased somewhat when we provided such distracters and made them easily accessible. Taken together, the findings suggest that depression involves an enhanced accessibility of interconnected negative thoughts that can undermine mental control efforts.
Concurrent and subsequent effects of suppressing versus expressing emotional (anxious and depressing) and neutral material were investigated. Subjects either suppressed or expressed thoughts about an anxious, depressing, or neutral target situation during an initial thought period. During the subsequent period, all subjects expressed thoughts about the same target situation. Analyses of thought content revealed that attempts to suppress the thought did not eliminate its occurrence. During the subsequent expression period, subjects in the initial expression condition displayed a significant decrease in statements about the target situation, indicating habituation, whereas subjects in the initial suppression condition showed an increase. Variations in this general pattern were observed on the basis of the different emotional valences of the target situations.
The present study reports on the development and preliminary validation of a 52 item self-report instrument designed to assess intrusive thoughts, images and impulses that are similar to the aggressive, sexual and disease-related thinking characteristic of clinical obsessions. Two hundred and ninety-three students completed the Obsessive Intrusions Inventory (OII) as well as standard self-report measures of negative cognitions and obsessive, anxious and depressive symptoms. Regression analysis revealed that intrusive thinking was a significant and unique predictor of obsessional but not anxious or depressive symptoms. Furthermore, intrusive thinking showed a moderate correlation with anxious but not depressive cognitions. The results indicate that the intrusive thoughts assessed by the OII are distinct from other forms of negative thinking and may, in fact, constitute an analogue form of clinical obsessions in nonclinical populations.
The study demonstrates that the rebound effect of thought suppression (Wegner, 1989) has an analog in the experience of somatic discomfort. During a cold-pressor pain induction, 63 Ss were instructed either to concentrate on their room at home (distraction), to pay close attention to their hand sensations (monitoring), or to remove awareness of those sensations from mind (suppression). Two min of postpressor pain ratings showed that monitoring produced the most rapid recovery from the pain and that suppression produced the slowest. Suppression also contaminated the interpretation of a subsequent somatic stimulation; later in the experimental hour, Ss who had suppressed their cold-pressor discomfort rated an innocuous vibration as more unpleasant than did other Ss. The strategies are discussed for their necessarily distinct processes of goal evaluation and their possibly differential drain on perceived coping capacities.
nature of anxiety and anger as emotional states and the procedures employed in their measurement are reviewed briefly / the measures of state and trait anxiety are discussed, and the development of the State-Trait Anxiety Inventory (STAI) is described in some detail / examine conceptual ambiguities in the constructs of anger, hostility, and aggression, briefly evaluate a number of instruments developed to assess anger and hostility, and describe the construction and validation of the State-Trait Anger Scale (STAS) / expression and control of anger are considered, and the development of the Anger Expression (AX) Scale and the State-Trait Anger Expression Inventory (STAXI) are described / concludes with a discussion of the utilization of anxiety and anger measures in treatment planning and evaluation
An experiment was conducted to investigate whether deliberate attempts to avoid a thought content have paradoxical effects. Twenty-four Ss received thought suppression instructions, 16 neutral instructions. Thought suppression resulted in an increased number of occurrences of the thought to be suppressed. The contribution of the results to the theory of obsessions is discussed.
Previous studies have shown that when normal subjects are instructed to think of a white bear (“forced” expression instructions), they do so more frequently when they have previously suppressed the thought of a white bear than when they have not suppressed this thought. It has been proposed that this rebound effect of thought suppression provides a laboratory model for the development of real-life obsessions. The present studies were undertaken in order to explore further the tenability of this model. Rebound effects were evaluated when more “liberal” expression instructions (“you might think of a white bear, but you don't have to”) were used. In Experiment 1, no evidence was obtained to suggest that suppression results in a heightened frequency and/or accelerated rate of white bear thoughts during a subsequent expression period (with “liberal” instructions). Interestingly, initial suppression lead to an immediate and stable increase of thought related electrodermal fluctuations. In Experiment 2, it was found that successful suppressors (few target thoughts during suppression) report fewer white bear thoughts during expression (with “liberal” instructions) than unsuccessful suppressors (many target thoughts during suppression). Assuming that the ecological validity of “liberal” expression instructions is greater than that of “forced” instructions, the present findings cast doubt on the claim that the rebound effect mimics the etiology of obsessions. The findings also suggest that it may be the immediate counter-productive effects of suppression that are relevant to theories concerned with obsessions.
Anxiety was defined by Freud as “something felt,” an emotional state that included feelings of apprehension, tension, nervousness, and worry accompanied by physiological arousal. Consistent with Darwin's evolutionary perspective, Freud observed that anxiety was adaptive in motivating behavior that helped individuals cope with threatening situations and that intense anxiety was prevalent in most psychiatric disorders. In measuring anxiety, Cattell (1966) emphasized the importance of distinguishing between anxiety as an emotional state and individual differences in anxiety as a personality trait.
Keywords:
anxiety;
STAI;
emotion;
personality;
state anxiety;
trait anxiety
Two studies addressed dysphoric individuals' suppression of unwanted thoughts. The mood-congruence hypothesis was that dysphoric subjects would be less successful suppressing negative thoughts and more successful suppressing positive thoughts than nondysphoric subjects. The cognitive-effort hypothesis was that dysphoric relative to nondysphoric subjects would be less successful suppressing thoughts of any kind, particularly in the latter portion of a suppression period. In Study 1, dysphoric and nondysphoric subjects were given either success or failure feedback on a test. They were then asked not to think of this test while completing a 5-min think-aloud procedure. In line with the mood-congruence hypothesis, dysphoric subjects had more intrusions of failure and fewer intrusions of success than nondysphoric subjects. In line with the cognitive-effort hypothesis, dysphoric subjects in both feedback conditions exhibited more intrusions in the fifth, final minute of the think-aloud period. In Study 2, dysphoric and nondysphoric subjects were instructed not to think of the neutral target white bear. Again, dysphoric relative to nondysphoric subjects exhibited more intrusions in the fifth, final minute of the think-aloud period.
In view of certain psychometric deficiencies of the original Psychoticism scale, an attempt was made to improve the scale by adding new items. It was attempted to increase the internal reliability of the scale, improve the shape of the distribution and increase the mean and variance score. Two different studies are discussed. Reliabilities are now somewhat improved, distributions are closer to normal and mean scores are higher than on the old scale. Four new short 12-item scales for the measurement of P, E, N and L are also given.
Consequences of thought suppression were compared in people characterized by different levels of obsessive-compulsive symptoms. Eighty-five female students were asked to retrieve an uncomfortable thought. Then they were instructed either to think about anything they liked or to do the same with the exception that they were not to think about the uncomfortable thought. The subjects subsequently wrote down their stream of thought. Then all subjects were asked to think without any limitation for a second period. There was a significant interaction between obsessive-compulsive symptoms measured with the Maudsley Obsession-Compulsion Inventory and initial instruction, with regard to the occurrence of the uncomfortable thought during the first period, for two out of three measures. Alternative explanations of the results are discussed.
A simple questionnaire was developed as an instrument for assessing the existence and extent of different obsessional-compulsive complaints. Two major types of complaint, checking and washing compulsions, and two minor types, slowness and doubting, were established. The final form of the questionnaire, and major properties, are presented.
This article reviews the cognitive therapy of depression. The psychotherapy based on this theory consists of behavioral and verbal techniques to change cognitions, beliefs, and errors in logic in the patient's thinking. A few of the various techniques are described and a case example is provided. Finally, the outcome studies testing the efficacy of this approach are reviewed.
Three related, exploratory studies were carried out in order to ascertain the occurrence and nature of normal obsessions, and to relate them to abnormal obsessions. The subjects included 8 obsessional patients, and up to 124 non-clinical subjects.Broadly, the findings were that normal obsessions are a common experience and they resemble the form of abnormal obsessions. They also show some notable similarities of content. However normal and abnormal obsessions differ in several respects, including frequency, duration, intensity and consequences, among others.With repeated practice, the frequency, duration and discomfort of obsessions are observed to decrease. Overall, the findings are considered to be consistent with the noxious stimulus cum habituation theory.
Previous studies have indicated that suppression of a thought results in an immediate increase of the frequency of this thought and/or in a rebound effect, i.e. in a heightened frequency of this thought later on. The present study (n = 53) examined the relationship between suppression and emotionality of the to-be-suppressed material. More specifically, it was investigated whether suppression of an emotional story results in stronger immediate enhancement or thought rebounds than suppression of a neutral story. There was a clear initial enhancement effect in the group suppressing a neutral story: subjects who tried to suppress experienced more target thoughts than subjects who did not try to suppress. In the neutral-story conditions, no rebound effect occurred. In the groups exposed to an emotional story, there was neither evidence of initial enhancement nor of a rebound. As most obsessions are related to emotional themes, the present findings cast doubt on the claim that the rebound phenomenon represents a valid laboratory model for clinical obsessions.
The present study identified distinctive response styles to unpleasant cognitive intrusions to further understanding of intrusive phenomena similar to those observed in obsessive-compulsive disorder and other anxiety disorders. Response styles were studied among 125 university students who completed a questionnaire describing and evaluating seven cognitive intrusions and inventories of depressive, anxious, and compulsive symptoms. Almost all subjects (99%) reported intrusions and 92% included effortful strategies in response to intrusions in their repertoire. Large differences were observed in the dominant strategy used. Three distinctive dominant response styles were identified including no effortful response (26%) and two effortful styles, attentive thinking (34%), and escape/avoidance (40%). The two groups using effortful strategies were more anxious and reported more difficulty removing intrusions. The group using escape/avoidance strategies reported more sadness, worry, guilt, and disapproval than subjects reporting no effortful response. The attentive thinking group reported more varied forms and more frequently triggered intrusions then the no effortful response group. Within subject analyses support the group comparisons and showed that intrusions eliciting escape/avoidance strategies were evaluated more disapprovingly than thoughts eliciting attentive thinking. The results are discussed in terms of Salkovskis' (Behavior Research and Therapy, 27, 677-682, 1985) formulation of obsessive-compulsive disorder and Borkovec's (Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 23, 481-482, 1985) and Barlow's (Anxiety and its disorders: The nature and treatment of anxiety and panic, 1988) discussions of worry and generalized anxiety.
An experiment investigating the hypothesis that trying to suppress a thought will lead to an immediate and/or delayed increase in its occurrence is reported. Normal subjects listened to a taped story and then verbalized their stream of consciousness during two consecutive time periods. During the first period, one group (suppression) were asked not to think about the tape while two other groups (controls) were asked to think about anything or think about anything including the tape. During the second period, all three groups were instructed to think about anything. Results from the first period failed to support the immediate enhancement hypothesis as the suppression group reported less thoughts about the tape than the controls. However, results from the second period supported the delayed (rebound) hypothesis as subjects who had previously suppressed reported more thoughts about the tape than subjects who had not. The theoretical, methodological, and clinical implications of these results are discussed.
Jakes' critique fails to consider (i) the importance of appraisal of responsibility in initiating neutralising activity, and that (ii) obsessional patients negatively evaluate the occurrence as well as the content of intrusive thoughts. These factors are crucial because neutralising is presumed to be central to the development and maintenance of obsessional disorders. The current form of the hypothesis is outlined and recent data reviewed. Possible experimental investigations on the focus of therapeutic interventions are considered.
In a first experiment, subjects verbalizing the stream of consciousness for a 5-min period were asked to try not to think of a white bear, but to ring a bell in case they did. As indicated both by mentions and by bell rings, they were unable to suppress the thought as instructed. On being asked after this suppression task to think about the white bear for a 5-min period, these subjects showed significantly more tokens of thought about the bear than did subjects who were asked to think about a white bear from the outset. These observations suggest that attempted thought suppression has paradoxical effects as a self-control strategy, perhaps even producing the very obsession or preoccupation that it is directed against. A second experiment replicated these findings and showed that subjects given a specific thought to use as a distracter during suppression were less likely to exhibit later preoccupation with the thought to be suppressed.
A replication of previous work on the incidence and characteristics of intrusive cognitions in non-clinical populations was carried out. The results closely reflected those obtained previously, and further relationships between variables were found. The importance of distinguishing between- and within-S data is stressed.
We conducted several tests of the idea that an inclination toward thought suppression is associated with obsessive thinking and emotional reactivity. Initially, we developed a self-report measure of thought suppression through successive factor-analytic procedures and found that it exhibited acceptable internal consistency and temporal stability. This measure, the White Bear Suppression Inventory (WBSI), was found to correlate with measures of obsessional thinking and depressive and anxious affect, to predict signs of clinical obsession among individuals prone toward obsessional thinking, to predict depression among individuals motivated to dislike negative thoughts, and to predict failure of electrodermal responses to habituate among people having emotional thoughts. The WBSI was inversely correlated with repression as assessed by the Repression-Sensitization Scale, and so taps a trait that is quite unlike repression as traditionally conceived.
It was argued that obsession-compulsion might affect the consequences of thought suppression. A group of 35 female students who were first submitted to thought suppression and then to an expression instruction were compared with a group of 38 female students submitted twice to an expression instruction. The emotional character of a target story read by subjects was systematically varied between subjects, and obsession-compulsion was included as a third between-subjects factors. No evidence of rebound or of initial enhancement was found when reported story-related thoughts were compared across instructional conditions. There was an interaction between obsession-compulsion and initial instruction on attempts to avoid target thoughts during the first period. Contrary to expectations obsession-compulsion was related to fewer attempts at suppression in the suppression and more in the expression conditions. Similarly, there was a trend for obsession-compulsion to be related to more frequent target thoughts in the expression and less in the suppression conditions. These findings are discussed in relation to the role of perceived responsibility in obsession-compulsion for thought as a determinant of thought processes of obsessive-compulsive people.
Previous research has suggested that unpleasant and unwanted thoughts are a frequent experience in both normal and clinical populations. This paper describes the development and validation of a questionnaire that assesses strategies for controlling such thoughts. Analyses of the Thought Control Questionnaire (TCQ) demonstrated five replicable factors: Distraction; Social Control; Worry; Punishment and Reappraisal. Significant associations were found between the punishment and worry subscales of the TCQ and various measures of emotional vulnerability and perceptions of impaired control over cognition. The implications of these findings are discussed in relation to the literature on thought suppression, worry and mental self-regulation.
Despite the crucial role typically given to negative thoughts in cognitive conceptualizations of emotional problems, few studies have compared the characteristics of varieties of such thoughts. The present study compared the process features of naturally occurring worries and obsessions in a non-patient group. Analyses of variance revealed several significant differences between these types of thought. The relationship between worries and obsessions, and the clinical and conceptual importance of the observed differences is briefly discussed.
High and low worriers were primed by a short period of worry, suppression of worry, or the same period of non-worrying thought. Analysis of thoughts during the period following showed that worriers had more than twice as many unpleasant thoughts as did controls, across all prior conditions. Priming condition had little effect on this difference, although worry suppression was associated with a slight increase in the frequency of neutral or pleasant thoughts in high worriers, and a slight decrease in controls. These results are taken as evidence against the hypothesis that suppression of upsetting thoughts increases their intrusive quality, and thereby contributes to anxiety disorders.
It has been suggested that the suppression of unwanted thoughts may increase their frequency and that this effect may contribute to some psychological problems. Previous studies have examined this over a period of minutes, in an artificial setting. Suppression over a four day period was evaluated in the present study. Each S was asked to identify a negative intrusive thought which he or she experienced and to record each occurrence of it in conditions designed to maximise the similarity to those experienced by obsessional patients. Ss were randomly allocated to one of three groups. One group was asked to suppress their thoughts whenever they occurred, another group was asked to think about their thoughts whenever they occurred and the third group just recorded the thoughts whenever they occurred. This design allowed experimental control of both attention to and manipulation of the target thoughts in contrast to attention and active suppression. It was found that Ss who suppressed their thoughts experienced more thoughts and found them more uncomfortable than Ss in the other two groups. This is consistent with the theory that suppression increases thought frequency and may be important in the development and maintenance of some disorders.
It has been hypothesized that personally relevant negative intrusive thoughts may be the direct precursors of obsessional thinking. Efforts made to suppress or neutralize are said to be involved in the transition between 'normal' and 'abnormal' intrusive thoughts. In order to test this hypothesis, naturally occurring intrusive thoughts were identified in non-clinical subjects, some of whom were asked to suppress these thoughts during an experimental period. The occurrence and characteristics of the target intrusive thoughts during suppression and a subsequent non-suppression period were assessed. The results indicate that (i) suppression can result in increased intrusion; and (ii) that distraction can play an important moderating role. It is suggested that, in suppression experiments, the effects of self-monitoring per se may have been underestimated. Motivated and intrusion-focussed monitoring of consciousness may be as important as suppression, given that obsessional patients tend to be constantly vigilant for the occurrence of obsessional thinking.
Deliberate suppression of intrusive thoughts has previously been shown to be associated with higher levels of intrusion compared to monitoring without suppression. In an attempt to apply this paradigm to people attempting smoking reduction and cessation, it was demonstrated that intrusive thoughts about smoking occur frequently. Subjects reported difficulty in controlling smoking related intrusions, and ratings indicated that all subjects made attempts to suppress them. In an experimental study, instructions to suppress were associated with increased frequency of intrusion compared to the control (mention) condition. A simple distracting task was highly effective in reducing intrusion frequency to below the levels obtained in the control condition, and intrusions remained significantly lower during the second (non-suppression) period.
Wegner, Schneider, Carter, and White in 1987 found that attempts to suppress thoughts of a white bear produced even greater preoccupation with that stimulus--a rebound effect. This effect was investigated in Exp. 1 using both Wegner's white bear stimulus and a more personally meaningful stimulus (an upcoming test). The rebound effect was not observed with either stimulus. Exp. 2 was conducted to examine the hypothesis that this failure to replicate Wegner, et al.'s rebound effect reflected individual differences in the respective subject pools. A within-subjects design was used to classify subjects as rebounders or nonrebounders by comparing each subject's expression of a thought following suppression to their own baseline expression of that thought. Subjects classified as rebounders had significantly higher ACT Mathematics subtest scores than did the subjects classified as nonrebounders. This suggests that there is a moderator variable related to mathematics ability for the rebound effect.
Research on thought suppression has yielded a morass of conflicting results. While some studies show that suppression of a thought results in a rebound effect (i.e. a heightened frequency of this thought later on), other studies failed to demonstrate this phenomenon. The first aim of the present study was to investigate whether the method used to study stream of consciousness (verbalization vs thinking silently) affects the report of target thoughts in a thought suppression experiment. Second, the claim that environmental cuing (i.e. distraction by directing attention towards external cues) is the mechanism behind the recurrence of suppressed items was examined. Results indicated that the method used to monitor stream of consciousness did not modulate the report of target thoughts: in fact, no rebound effect occurred. However, results did support the suggestion that heightened frequencies of suppressed material are related to environmental cuing.
This paper describes a study comparing three worry questionnaires; The Worry Domains Questionnaire (WDQ), The Penn State Worry Questionnaire (PSWQ), and The Student Worry Scale (SWS). The results suggested that (i) scores on two out of the three questionnaires exhibited sources of variance that were independent of trait anxiety, (ii) content-based questionnaires (the WDQ and SWS) appeared to capture features of task-oriented constructive worrying, whereas the PSWQ did not, and (iii) all three questionnaires indicated that worriers were characterized by an information-seeking, monitoring cognitive style and a tendency to indulge in avoidance coping behaviours. The implications of these findings for the development of a clinically useful diagnostic instrument are discussed.
It has often been suggested that attempts to suppress a thought will lead to an immediate and/or delayed increase in its occurrence. In a recent experiment (Clark, Ball & Pape, Behaviour Research and Therapy, 29, 253-257, 1991) we obtained a delayed (rebound) effect but failed to demonstrate an immediate enhancement effect. Lavey and van den Hout (Behavioural Psychotherapy, 18, 251-258, 1991) have suggested immediate enhancement might be observed only if subjects are instructed not to use distraction while suppressing. The present experiment tested this hypothesis. An immediate enhancement effect was not obtained but the delayed (rebound) effect was twice replicated and an artifactual explanation of this effect was discounted.
Thought suppression and analogue post-traumatic intrusions. Paper presented at the Worm Congress of Cognitive Therapy
- M I Davies
- D M Clark
Davies, M. I. & Clark, D. M. (1992). Thought suppression and analogue post-traumatic intrusions. Paper presented at the Worm Congress of Cognitive Therapy, Toronto, Canada.
Het effect van gedachte-onderdrukking: een quasi-experiment (The effect of thought suppression: a quasi-experiment) Directieve Therapie
- P Muris
- H Merckelbach
Muris, P. & Merckelbach, H. (1991). Het effect van gedachte-onderdrukking: een quasi-experiment (The effect of thought suppression: a quasi-experiment). Directieve Therapie, 11, 119-126.
Gedankenkontrolle bei Patienten mit Gegeneralisiertem Angstsyndrom (Thought suppression in patients with generalized anxiety disorder) Paper presented at the Tagung fiir experimentell arbeitender Psychologen und Psychologinnen
- E Becker
- W T Roth
- J Margraf
Becker, E., Roth, W. T. & Margraf, J. (1994). Gedankenkontrolle bei Patienten mit Gegeneralisiertem Angstsyndrom
(Thought suppression in patients with generalized anxiety disorder). Paper presented at the Tagung fiir experimentell
arbeitender Psychologen und Psychologinnen, Miinchen, Germany.
Het effect van gedachte-onderdrukking: een quasi-experiment (The effect of thought suppression: a quasi-experiment)
- Muris
Gedankenkontrolle bei Patienten mit Gegeneralisiertem Angstsyndrom
- Becker
Assessing coping strategies: a theoretically based approach
- Carver