Unintentional memory inhibition is weakened in non-clinical dissociators

Dissociation in borderline personality disorder: Disturbed cognitive and emotional inhibition and its neural correlates

“…Our findings are in line with studies examining nonclinical participants with dissociation proneness and also studies examining clinical participants with a dissociative disorder, which suggests that these populations are less efficient in suppressing both emotional and non-emotional distracting material (Freyd et al, 1998;DePrince and Freyd, 1999;Elzinga et al, 2000;Elzinga et al, 2003;Chiu et al, 2010;Chiu et al, 2012). In the current study, after dissociation induction, BPD patients showed reduced activity in the fusiform gyrus, which has been shown to be involved in colour processing (Beauchamp et al, 1999;Chao and Martin, 1999;Kellenbach et al, 2001) and word recognition (Nobre et al, 1994;Pammer et al, 2004;Binder et al, 2006), among others.…”

Trait Dissociation and the Subjective Affective, Motivational, and Phenomenological Experience of Self-Defining Memories

“…In particular, disruptions in attention and executive functioning are common correlates of dissociation. Chiu and colleagues (2010), for example, demonstrated that individuals high on dissociation show a reduced retrieval-induced forgetting effect, indicating that these individuals have weakened memory inhibition. In the context of self-defining memories, this may mean that individuals high on dissociation cannot inhibit associations related to the event in the memory.…”

“…First, we report the correlation between the continuous measure of dissociation and the affective and motivational responses to the memories. Second, we split dissociation into low dissociators (DES ≤ 10.00) and high dissociators (DES ≥ 30.00), based on clinical thresholds (Carlson et al, 1993) that have been applied successfully in research on nonclinical samples (e.g., Chiu et al, 2010; Oathes & Ray, 2008), and examined the mean differences in affect and motives across the two groups. We construe these latter analyses as supplementary analyses to the correlational ones; the dichotomous analyses serve to illustrate the differences in memory components between participants who score high and low on dissociation.…”

Childhood Trauma and Active Mental Processes: Dissociation and Metacognition Influence Control of Negative Thoughts

“…A recent study (Chiu et al 2010) found that highly dissociative non-clinical participants had reduced inhibition of irrelevant or unwanted items, compared with participants who were low or medium on self-reported trait dissociation. Chiu and colleagues (2010) pointed out that their study neither necessitated nor incorporated participants' intentionality.…”

“…People with high levels of dissociation may show general deficits in inhibiting unwanted information (Chiu et al 2010). Deficits in inhibiting information may, in turn, disrupt the ability to reappraise negative thoughts.…”