بررسی اثر ریباند در شکل گیری تصور: اثرات جذب و کنتراست بدنبال سرکوب افکار

Active suppression of a thought can lead to preoccupation with that thought. Thisrebound effectcan be conceptualized as an increase in cognitive accessibility. If so, then the effects of suppression-induced accessibility should be moderated by variables (such as cognitive load) that moderate the effects of accessibility produced by other priming procedures. Participants were asked to talk about people they knew, and some were askednotto think about specific favorable or unfavorable personality traits (e.g., honesty or dishonesty). Control participants were instead passively exposed to the same traits. Participants then formed an impression of an ambiguous target person, and half did so while also engaged in a distracting task. As predicted by Martin and Achee's (1992) set/reset model, when impressions were formed with no cognitive load, suppression led to contrast: Participants avoided using the suppressed traits to characterize the target. When cognitive load was increased, however, suppression led to assimilation: Participants reported that the target possessed the suppressed traits. Suppression is not only a poor strategy for avoiding thoughts, but the results of this study suggest that it can also have significant interpersonal consequences.

This research was supported by a grant from the Office of Social Science Research at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Portions of these results were presented at the May 1995 meeting of the Midwestern Psychological Association. We thank Lori McKinney, Jeff Sherman, Dan Wegner, Natalie Wyer, two anonymous reviewers, and the members of the University of Illinois at Chicago Social-Personality Psychology Journal Club for helpful comments on previous versions of this article. Thanks also to Dan Rodriguez and John Kamilis for helping us to collect and code data, and to Dan Gilbert and Brett Pelham for providing the videotape of the target person. Address correspondence and reprint requests to Leonard S. Newman, University of Illinois at Chicago, Psychology Department, 1007 West Harrison Street, Chicago, IL 60607-7137. E-mail: lnewman@uic.edu.