No sound is more distracting than the one you're trying not to hear: delayed costs of mental control of task-irrelevant neutral and emotional sounds.

BACKGROUND

Suppressing intrusive thoughts can result in a post-suppression rebound effect where the same thoughts become hyperaccessible. The current study aimed to investigate if similar so-called rebound effects could be observed when people attempted to mentally suppress awareness of nonsensical auditory stimuli. Based on previous research on thought suppression and mental control in other domains, we hypothesized that attempting to suppress awareness of a task-irrelevant sound while under cognitive load would impact evaluations of the sound on affective dimensions and loudness, and result in increased general vigilance, as evidenced by faster responding on subsequent tasks.

METHODS

We performed two experiments where participants in a suppression condition were initially instructed to mentally suppress awareness of a sound while performing a mentally challenging task. Participants in a control condition performed the same task without receiving any instructions regarding the sound. In Experiment 1, the sound was affectively neutral, while in Experiment 2 participants were presented with an inherently aversive (tinnitus-like) sound. After this initial phase, participants performed tasks measuring vigilance and attention, and were also asked to give subjective ratings of the sounds on a number of affective dimensions and loudness.

RESULTS

In Experiment 1, participants in the suppression condition showed faster response times on both a visual search task and an auditory spatial cueing task, as compared to participants in the control condition. Contrary to our predictions, participants in the suppression condition did not rate the distractor sound as louder than participants in the control condition, and there were no differences on affective dimensions. In Experiment 2, results revealed that participants in the suppression condition made more errors on a visual search task, specifically on trials where the previously suppressed sound was presented. In contrast to results from Experiment 1, participants in the suppression condition also rated the targeted sound as louder.

CONCLUSIONS

The findings provide preliminary support for a post-suppression rebound effect in the auditory domain and further suggest that this effect may be moderated by the emotional properties of the auditory stimulus.