De Vito David, Fenske Mark J
Department of Psychology, University of Guelph, Ontario, Canada.
Department of Psychology, University of Guelph, Ontario, Canada.
Cognition. 2017 May;162:1-11. doi: 10.1016/j.cognition.2017.01.020. Epub 2017 Feb 7.
Potentially distracting or otherwise-inappropriate stimuli, thoughts, or actions often must be inhibited to prevent interference with goal-directed behaviour. Growing evidence suggests that the impact of inhibition is not limited to reduced neurocognitive processing, but also includes negative affective consequences for any associated stimuli. The link between inhibition and aversive response has primarily been studied using tasks involving attentional- or response-related inhibition of external sensory stimuli. Here we show that affective devaluation also occurs when inhibition is applied to fully-encoded stimulus representations in memory. We first replicated prior findings of increased forgetting of words whose memories were suppressed in a Think/No-think procedure (Experiment 1). Incorporating a stimulus-evaluation task within this procedure revealed that suppressing memories of words (Experiment 2) and visual objects (Experiment 3) also results in their affective devaluation. Given the critical role of memory for guiding thoughts and actions, these results suggest that the affective consequences of inhibition may occur across a far broader range of situations than previously understood.
潜在的干扰性或其他不适当的刺激、想法或行为通常必须被抑制,以防止干扰目标导向行为。越来越多的证据表明,抑制的影响不仅限于减少神经认知加工,还包括对任何相关刺激产生负面情感后果。抑制与厌恶反应之间的联系主要是通过涉及对外部感官刺激进行注意力或反应相关抑制的任务来研究的。在这里,我们表明,当对记忆中完全编码的刺激表征应用抑制时,也会发生情感贬值。我们首先重复了之前的研究结果,即在“想/不想”程序中抑制记忆的单词遗忘增加(实验1)。在此程序中纳入刺激评估任务表明,抑制单词(实验2)和视觉对象(实验3)的记忆也会导致它们的情感贬值。鉴于记忆在指导思想和行动中的关键作用,这些结果表明,抑制的情感后果可能发生在比以前理解的更广泛的情况下。