سرکوب ناموفق با افزایش روان رنجوری، افکار مزاحم، و نشخوار فکری همراه است

Studies of thought suppression, the reduction in accessibility for intentionally unrehearsed and actively avoided thoughts, vary dramatically in the level of suppression reported. The purpose of our research was to explore individual differences associated with self-reports of the success, failure, or avoidance of thought suppression in everyday life. Participants completed a survey measuring intrusive thoughts, neuroticism, rumination, and autobiographical knowledge of suppression tendencies and capabilities. Individuals who reported successful suppression were less neurotic, ruminative, and experienced less thought intrusion than individuals who reported unsuccessful suppression attempts. Our findings suggest that the high-ends of the neuroticism and intrusive thought spectrums are occupied by individuals who unsuccessfully attempt to suppress undesirable information, while successful suppressors differ minimally from non-suppressors.

The ability to actively avoid thinking about unpleasant or otherwise undesirable information is a skill that varies between individuals; whether the information is a traumatic experience or an annoying altercation in traffic, it is often important to a task at hand to suppress unwanted information. In the present study we examined the relationship between self-reports of the use and success of thought suppression and personality traits which have been associated in previous work (Levy and Anderson, 2008 and Munoz et al., 2013) with thought suppression. The executive deficit hypothesis (Levy & Anderson, 2008) predicts that successful suppression is contingent on executive control. This hypothesis is supported in literature examining neuroimaging (Anderson et al., 2004), aging (Anderson, Reinholz, Kuhl, & Mayr, 2011), and intrusive thoughts (Hasher, Zacks, & May, 1999). Neuroticism is intimately related to both executive functioning and intrusive thoughts (Munoz et al., 2013). Munoz and colleagues found neuroticism to be positively correlated with experiences of intrusive thoughts, and both neuroticism and intrusive thoughts to be negatively correlated to working memory performance. Klein and Boals (2001) found life stress to impair working memory capacity (Experiment 1, 2). Suls and Martin (2005) describe a neurotic cascade; individuals high in neuroticism are motivated to engage in thought suppression, even though their attempts at suppression may prove unsuccessful, as described above. Emotionally negative information may be better suppressed than emotionally positive information (e.g., Lambert et al., 2010 and Noreen and MacLeod, 2013). According to the Neurotic Cascade, highly neurotic individuals appraise events as more harmful or threatening, and negative affect from stressful experiences may carry over to adjacent experiences or thoughts which may not be negative per se. This predilection to experience emotionally negative events leads highly neurotic individuals to allocate more attention to events perceived as negative, and to remember those events in more detail (see Rusting, 1998). This overly negative outlook tends to be comorbid with rumination; brooding and focusing on one’s negative mood or experiences ( Muris et al., 2005, Nolen-Hoeksema and Morrow, 1991, Wenzlaff and Luxton, 2003 and Yoon et al., 2013). Attending and ruminating on emotionally negative events along with a reduced capacity for suppression certainly leaves highly neurotic individuals at a disadvantage in terms of the potential for intrusive, unwanted thoughts. As this brief review has illustrated, research carried out to-date has examined a range of individual differences associated with suppression and thought intrusion. However, a critical question has yet to be addressed: Do individuals who engage habitually in thought suppression and experience this cognitive strategy as successful differ from those who engage in the same strategy but experience their attempts at suppressing unwanted thoughts as unsuccessful? The purpose of the present study is to determine if personality traits associated with suppression reliably vary between groups that report different levels of suppressive success. A survey method was used to address this question because our comparison of personality attributes between groups who reported success and failure, with regard to thought suppression, required a relatively large sample size. Thus, while previous work has shown that high neuroticism is associated with increased frequency of intrusive thoughts (Munoz et al., 2013), in the current study we employed a novel measure to differentiate participants who believe they have not engaged in suppression (i.e., non-suppressors) from those who report having engaged in suppression either successfully (i.e., successful suppressors) or unsuccessfully (i.e., unsuccessful suppressors). We examine the differences between non-suppressors, successful suppressors, and unsuccessful suppressors on measures of neuroticism, rumination, and the experience of intrusive thoughts. Our measure, termed the Retrospective and Prospective Suppression Inventory (RPSI) differentiates between non-suppressors, successful suppressors, and unsuccessful suppressors in both a retrospective and prospective sense; whether the individual has engaged in suppression previously, and will they engage in suppression in future instances of undesirable thoughts. We hypothesise that trait neuroticism will be, as previously observed, positively correlated to the experience of intrusive thoughts (Munoz et al., 2013) and rumination (Muris et al., 2005 and Yoon et al., 2013). We predict that individuals who report utilising suppression will have higher levels of trait neuroticism, intrusive thought prevalence, and rumination than individuals who do not report utilising suppression. Further, we predict that trait neuroticism, intrusive thought prevalence, and rumination will vary between non-suppressors, successful suppressors, and unsuccessful suppressors. Specifically, we predict unsuccessful suppressors to have higher levels of trait neuroticism and intrusive thought experiences than both non-suppressors and successful suppressors. That is, unsuccessful suppressors are predicted to possess traits associated with decreased executive function. These predictions are based on participants reported past suppressive activity, rather than speculative future suppressive attempts. Lastly, robust differences between genders have been previously observed for neuroticism (Costa, Terracciano, & McCrae, 2001), intrusive thoughts (Wegner & Zanakos, 1994), and rumination (Nolen-Hoeksema & Jackson, 2001); females tend to score higher than males on all three measures. Supplementary analyses will determine if differences observed between RPSI groups are subject to gender differences.