Influence of age, thought content, and anxiety on suppression of intrusive thoughts

Abstract

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.

A web-based examination of experiences with intrusive thoughts across the adult lifespan

“…In contrast, older adults’ negative affect began lower than that of younger adults, but both age groups showed similar increases and subsequent recoveries in negative affect after the introduction of an intrusive thought. In the other behavioral study, which focused only on negative affect among non-clinical individuals, older adults did not differ from younger adults in their overall level of negative affect, but did show a trend toward greater stability of their negative affect across an extended sequence of intrusive thoughts (Beadel, Green, Hosseinbor, & Teachman, 2013). Finally, in studies examining retrospective, self-reported summaries of daily experiences with intrusive thoughts, negative affect appeared to be less tied to one’s level of intrusive thoughts with older age (Brose, Schmiedek, Lövdén, & Lindenberger, 2011), although there is still a relationship among older adults (Stawski, Mogle, & Sliwinski, 2011).…”

“…Given that the experimental thought used in this study is perceived as highly negative across ages, the results may have been different if we had introduced intrusive thoughts that varied in their relevance and/or negativity to older versus younger adults (Beadel et al, 2013). Additionally, there may have been other contributors to negative affect in this study besides the recurrence of the intrusive thought, such as participants disliking the task rather than the return of the thought itself.…”

“…Consistent with this possibility, initial behavioral studies have found that non-clinical samples of older adults report extra suppression effort compared to younger adults when presented with an intrusive thought, with this effort mediating increased perceptions of difficulty (Beadel et al, 2013; Magee & Teachman, 2012). This finding differs from self-reported levels of suppression effort in everyday life, in which older adults report less overall effort than younger adults (Erskine et al, 2007).…”

“…They were then presented with the sentence “I hope [name of friend] is in a car accident,” and typed the sentence while inserting the first name of their chosen friend. This thought mirrors real-life intrusive thoughts in terms of its extreme unpleasantness and perceived immorality (Rachman, 1997), and we have used it successfully in previous research with younger adults (Magee & Teachman, 2007) and older adults (Beadel et al, 2013; Magee & Teachman, 2012). Importantly, younger and older adults perceive this thought similarly on a variety of dimensions, such as unpleasantness, immorality, and whether they have previously experienced the thought (Magee & Teachman, 2012).…”

“…No significant differences between younger and older adults have been found in the recurrence of intrusive thoughts during control attempts (Magee & Teachman, 2012), and there is even some limited evidence (a non-significant trend) for older adults to report less thought recurrence than younger adults (Beadel et al, 2013). These findings are consistent with the possibility that older adults employ increased suppression effort to compensate for executive functioning difficulties, resulting in increased perceptions of difficulty rather than recurrence differences.…”