Understanding differences in responses following attempts to suppress versus simply monitor intrusive thoughts is important given the established relationship between intrusive thinking and numerous forms of psychopathology. Moreover, these differences may vary as a function of age. Because of the links between aging and both enhancement in emotion regulation skills and decline in inhibition skills, older and younger adults were expected to differ in their responses (e.g., experience of negative affect and thought recurrence) to attempts at suppressing intrusive thoughts. This study examined whether efforts to suppress thought content that varied in valence and age-relevance differentially affected older (N = 40, aged 66–92) and younger (N = 42, aged 16–25) adults’ ability to inhibit intrusive thought recurrence and their resulting negative affect. Interestingly, older adults experienced less recurrence for most thoughts than younger adults. Also, for several dependent variables (negative affect and perceived difficulty suppressing intrusive thoughts), older adults showed less decline in their magnitude of response across thinking periods (i.e., from suppression to monitoring) than did younger adults. These age effects were not generally moderated by level of trait anxiety, though higher anxiety did predict intrusive thought responding in expected directions, such as greater negative affect. These findings point to independent influences of age and anxiety, and suggest a complex mix of risk and protective factors for older adults’ responses to intrusive thoughts.
Although most everyone experiences intrusive thoughts on occasion (Rachman and de Silva, 1978 and Salkovskis and Harrison, 1984), cognitive theories of obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD) suggest that it is the manner in which one interprets and responds to these repetitive, unwanted thoughts that influences both the negative affect associated with the thought and the frequency with which the thought recurs (e.g., Langlois et al., 2000, Obsessive, 1997, Rachman, 1998 and Salkovskis, 1998). Ongoing attempts to suppress unwanted thoughts, for example, is one response that has been found to promote later thought recurrence1 and negative affect (Trinder and Salkovskis, 1994 and Wegner and Zanakos, 1994). Studies examining responses to intrusive thoughts have primarily focused on younger adults, neglecting the potential impact of developmental changes over the lifespan that could lead to differences in responses to intrusive thoughts (Calamari, Janeck, & Deer, 2002). Investigating age differences in responses to intrusive thoughts can lead to an enhanced understanding of both emotional processing in the context of healthy aging, as well as gerontological anxiety, a critical but understudied problem (e.g., Schaub and Linden, 2000 and Wolitzky-Taylor et al., 2010).
Cognitive models of intrusive thoughts in the context of OCD emphasize how interpretations of intrusive thoughts as personally significant lead to increases in negative affect and subsequent recurrence of the thought (Rachman, 1997 and Rachman, 1998); however, thought content can also play a significant role. Rowa and Purdon (2003) found that intrusive thoughts with content that contradicted a person's values or self-concept were rated as more upsetting and were appraised as more negative than thoughts that were less contradictory to self-concept. Additionally, using a thought suppression paradigm similar to the one used in the current study, Corcoran and Woody (2009) asked religious and non-religious participants to suppress (or they were explicitly asked not to suppress) a blasphemous thought. The researchers found that the religious participants experienced greater anxiety during the task and greater thought frequency upon directed thought suppression compared to the non-religious participants. This research points to the likely role of personal and (sub)cultural relevance of the content of intrusive thoughts in determining responses to such thoughts.
Age is another factor that is commonly associated with considerable differences in what goals and values are deemed important (Carstensen, 1993 and Carstensen, 2006), and recent evidence suggests emotional reactivity can vary as a function of the age-relevance of the stimuli (Kunzmann and Grühn, 2005 and Teachman and Gordon, 2009). Yet, there is a dearth of research examining age-related differences in responding to intrusive thoughts, both in general and specific to intrusive thought content that varies by typical, lifespan development concerns.
Investigating age differences in responding to different types of intrusive thoughts following thought suppression attempts can help determine whether hypothesized differences are due mainly to age variance in the thought suppression process (e.g., because of age-related differences in emotion reactivity and cognitive processing) or to the impact of thought content (e.g., thoughts that vary in age-relevance). We investigated the independent and interactive influences of age and trait anxiety on older and younger adults’ thought recurrence and negative affect when attempting to suppress thoughts that are relevant to the common concerns of their respective age group, compared to other types of thoughts, including an age-neutral positive thought and an age-neutral negative thought.
