Voluntary suppression of thoughts is influenced by anxious and ruminative tendencies in healthy volunteers

Abstract

Replicating thought suppression effects with the Think/No-Think paradigm (TNT) has failed in some studies investigating the phenomenon of below-baseline recall of suppressed stimuli. Attempts have been made to isolate factors that might explain inter-individual differences in suppression performance. Certain personality traits, whether associated with a pathological state or investigated in a community sample, have been shown to interfere with successful thought suppression and might be responsible for some of the negative results obtained in TNT studies. In the present study we investigate the influence of psychometric measures of depression and anxiety in a fairly large sample of healthy volunteers. We show that high brooding and anxious tendencies predict worse suppression performance. While no suppression was shown when investigating the TNT not taking the psychometric measures into account, including these two traits in the analysis resulted in a pattern of below-baseline recall only for low brooders and low anxious participants. We argue that inclusion of variables measuring personality traits is warranted using the TNT and that these variables already exert their influence at minimal levels of variance, significantly improving the interpretability of the results. Future research should therefore cautiously investigate potential confounding personality characteristics before analysing their data.

Neural correlates underlying impaired memory facilitation and suppression of negative material in depression

“…Furthermore, in view of the fact that anxiety and depressive symptoms are highly comorbid434445, and that some researches indicate a correlation between anxiety and inability of memory suppression7, we only recruited participants with high-trait anxiety in this study, i.e., the memory suppression deficit was investigated in comparison between the depressed individuals with anxiety and the nondepressed individuals with anxiety.…”

“…low depression, or patients vs . controls)71025 or did not find any difference in Think condition between groups824. More importantly, the neural mechanism underlying the impaired performance in the T/NT task has not been investigated.…”

“…Recent literatures suggest that the excessively enhanced memory for negative material in depression is not only caused by the "bottom-up" deficit of biased selective attention to negativity, but also due to the "top-down" impairment of executive control that disables patients from removing irrelevant negative material from memory45. Numerous studies have demonstrated that, compared with nondepressed counterparts, depressed individuals have more difficulties in excluding the unwanted memory from awareness6789101112. Such memory suppression deficits may induce sustained flashbacks associated with a gloomy thinking trend, and the enhanced gloomy feeling, in turn, makes negative memories more easily to be retrieved, resulting in a vicious circle of mood-congruent recall and prolonged depressive mood101314.…”

“…In particular, Hertel and Gerstel8 observed a close correlation between the severity of rumination and inhibitory difficulties; compared with nondepressed individuals, depressed individuals recalled higher percentages of targets in the No-Think condition (see also in Hertel & Mahan24). In another research, Dieler et al 7. investigated the intentional memory suppression in 71 volunteers, finding that high brooding tendency predicted worse suppression performance and that this effect was more obvious for negative, compared with neutral, memories.…”

“…For example, the success of intentional memory suppression in the T/NT is usually reflected by a lower recall rate of suppressed targets compared with the recall rate of baseline targets (i.e., targets which have been neither suppressed nor retrieved)16. However, while many studies failed to produce below-baseline suppression for negative and/or neutral materials in depressed individuals781024, Joormann et al 25. found that depressed patients successfully forgot negative targets and showed enhanced effect of below-baseline forgetting as more opportunities for suppression had been provided.…”