Thought suppression

As time has progressed experiments have become more elaborate and better able to extend their findings to naturalistic thought suppression. The results of these studies are not encouraging in as much as they have demonstrated that trying to suppress impersonal and, on the face of it, personal thoughts is ineffective as the frequency of that thought increases during suppression and after it. Importantly, whilst the evidence shows that we can control these thoughts from being translated into behaviour when self-monitoring is high such control is not observable in normal, automatic behaviours (i.e. skinhead scenario). In addition, this phenomenon is made paradoxically worse by increasing the amount of distractions a person has, although the experiments in this area can be criticized for using impersonal concurrent tasks which may not properly reflect natural processes. However, when only one distracter is used thought suppression has been shown to be successful. In explaining these results Wegner’s (1994) ‘Ironic Process Theory’ (where two processes monitor and search for distractions) is the most appropriate model; however, given the mixed evidence for emotional thoughts and commensurate with the latest research it is suggested that a model needs to account for individual differences to be considered robust. Thus, it can be concluded that thought suppression is a real phenomenon with observable effects and that typical results show it is largely an ineffective activity in the laboratory at least.