Academy for Advanced Interdisciplinary Studies, Peking University, China.
Division of Anaesthesia, Department of Clinical Neurosciences, University of Cambridge, UK; Department of Psychology, Harvard University, United States.
Cognition. 2019 Jun;187:78-94. doi: 10.1016/j.cognition.2019.02.016. Epub 2019 Mar 7.
When we seek to forget unwelcome memories, does the suppressed content still exert an unconscious influence on our thoughts? Although intentionally stopping retrieval of a memory reduces later episodic retention for the suppressed trace, it remains unclear the extent to which suppressed content persists in indirectly influencing mental processes. Here we tested whether inhibitory control processes underlying retrieval suppression alter the influence of a memory's underlying semantic content on later thought. To achieve this, across two experiments, we tested whether suppressing episodic retrieval of to-be-excluded memories reduced the indirect expression of the unwanted content on an apparently unrelated test of problem solving: the remote associates test (RAT). Experiment 1 found that suppressed content was less likely than unsuppressed content to emerge as solutions to RAT problems. Indeed, suppression abolished evidence of conceptual priming, even when participants reported no awareness of the relationship between the memory and the problem solving tasks. Experiment 2 replicated this effect and also found that directing participants to use explicit memory to solve RAT problems eliminated suppression effects. Experiment 2 thus rules out the possibility that suppression effects reflect contamination by covert explicit retrieval strategies. Together, our results indicate that inhibitory control processes underlying retrieval suppression not only disrupt episodic retention, but also reduce the indirect influence of suppressed semantic content during unrelated thought processes. Considered with other recent demonstrations of implicit suppression effects, these findings indicate that historical assumptions about the persisting influence of suppressed thoughts on mental health require closer empirical scrutiny and need to be reconsidered.
当我们试图忘记不愉快的记忆时，被压抑的内容是否仍会对我们的思维产生无意识的影响？虽然有意阻止记忆的检索会减少被压抑痕迹的后期情景记忆保留，但仍不清楚被压抑的内容在多大程度上持续影响心理过程。在这里，我们测试了抑制控制过程是否会改变记忆的潜在语义内容对后续思维的间接影响。为了实现这一目标，我们在两个实验中测试了抑制对被排除记忆的情景检索是否会减少不受欢迎内容在看似无关的解决问题测试（远程联想测试）中的间接表达。实验 1 发现，与未被压抑的内容相比，被压抑的内容不太可能成为 RAT 问题的解决方案。事实上，即使参与者报告对记忆和问题解决任务之间的关系没有意识，抑制也会消除概念启动的证据。实验 2 复制了这一效果，并发现引导参与者使用外显记忆来解决 RAT 问题会消除抑制效应。实验 2 因此排除了抑制效应反映了隐蔽外显检索策略污染的可能性。总之，我们的结果表明，检索抑制所基于的抑制控制过程不仅会破坏情景记忆保留，还会减少在无关思维过程中被压抑语义内容的间接影响。结合最近对隐性抑制效应的其他演示，这些发现表明，关于被压抑的想法对心理健康的持续影响的历史假设需要更密切的实证审查，并需要重新考虑。
