Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, University of California, Santa Barbara, CA 93106-9660, United States.
Conscious Cogn. 2013 Sep;22(3):1003-12. doi: 10.1016/j.concog.2013.06.009. Epub 2013 Aug 2.
The current research investigates the interaction between thought suppression and individuals' explicit awareness of their thoughts. Participants in three experiments attempted to suppress thoughts of a prior romantic relationship and their success at doing so was measured using a combination of self-catching and experience-sampling. In addition to thoughts that individuals spontaneously noticed, individuals were frequently caught engaging in thoughts of their previous partner at experience-sampling probes. Furthermore, probe-caught thoughts were: (i) associated with stronger decoupling of attention from the environment, (ii) more likely to occur under cognitive load, (iii) more frequent for individuals with a desire to reconcile, and (iv) associated with individual differences in the tendency to suppress thoughts. Together, these data suggest that individuals can lack meta-awareness that they have begun to think about a topic they are attempting to suppress, providing novel insight into the cognitive processes that are involved in attempting to control undesired mental states.
当前的研究调查了思维抑制与个体对自身思维的显意识之间的相互作用。在三个实验中，参与者试图抑制对先前恋爱关系的想法，并通过自我捕捉和经验抽样的组合来衡量他们抑制的成功程度。除了个体自发注意到的想法外，个体在经验抽样探测中也经常被发现正在思考他们的前任伴侣。此外，探测到的想法包括：（i）与注意力与环境的分离程度更强有关，（ii）在认知负荷下更有可能发生，（iii）对于有和解愿望的个体更频繁，以及（iv）与抑制思维的个体差异有关。总的来说，这些数据表明，个体可能缺乏对他们已经开始思考他们试图抑制的主题的元意识，这为试图控制不良心理状态所涉及的认知过程提供了新的见解。
