Nonreplicating white bears and other irrepressible cautions.
Item
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Title
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Nonreplicating white bears and other irrepressible cautions.
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Identifier
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AAI9908316
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identifier
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9908316
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Creator
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Gildston, Phyllis.
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Contributor
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Adviser: Matthew Erdelyi
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Date
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1998
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Psychology, Cognitive
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Abstract
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Three experiments were conducted to test the robustness and generalizability of the rebound and initial enhancement effects. The first study was a close replication of the original "white bear" experiment (Wegner, Schneider, Carter and White, 1987) which uncovered the rebound phenomenon. As they spoke their thoughts aloud in that study, subjects were asked not to think about a white bear for five minutes and then to think about the creature for the next five minutes. Other subjects were asked to suppress thoughts of a white bear but only after first being asked to think about it for five minutes. Thus, order of instruction, to think or not to think, was manipulated to determine if it mattered whether you suppressed thoughts of a target stimulus initially or only later after first being given the opportunity to express thoughts about that target stimulus. The rebound effect refers to an inordinate subsequent preoccupation with any thought that one attempts initially to banish from consciousness. Specifically, after a period of thought suppression, normal subjects had thoughts about white bears more often in the expression period following suppression than a comparison group of subjects who were instructed to express their thoughts about the stimulus immediately after its introduction. Other studies (e.g., Lavy and van den Hout, 1990) have reported finding a contrarian initial enhancement effect, which occurs when the initial suppression group actually has a larger number of the forbidden thoughts during the initial suppression period than does the initial expression group during its initial expression period. The attempt to suppress deliberately has been tagged as the source of both effects; the more one tries to keep a thought out of mind, the more it will try to insinuate itself--sooner or later. The second and third experiments in the current study used longer, contextual stimuli (one a strange tale from another culture, and the other, a dry prose text). Neither effect was observed in either the replication or extended contextual experiments.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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PQT Legacy CUNY.xlsx
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degree
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Ph.D.
