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Training the forgetting of negative words: The role of direct suppression and the relation to stress reactivity
Author(s) -
LeMoult Joelle,
Hertel Paula T.,
Joormann Jutta
Publication year - 2010
Publication title -
applied cognitive psychology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.719
H-Index - 100
eISSN - 1099-0720
pISSN - 0888-4080
DOI - 10.1002/acp.1682
Subject(s) - forgetting , psychology , stressor , recall , retrieval induced forgetting , motivated forgetting , mood , reactivity (psychology) , cognitive psychology , stress (linguistics) , developmental psychology , social psychology , clinical psychology , medicine , linguistics , philosophy , alternative medicine , pathology
Recent research has demonstrated that people can be trained to forget negative material. This experiment assessed the possible benefit of direct suppression in addition to the benefit of thought substitutes (indirect suppression) on subsequent attempts to recall words. We also investigated the association between recall following suppression training and subsequent responses to an acute laboratory stressor. After learning cue‐target word pairs, participants completed a training phase in which they practiced suppressing targets and recalling substitutes or simply recalling substitutes with no instruction to suppress. Our results show similar effects of suppression condition on forgetting. Importantly, however, the absence of direct suppression predicted mood change in response to a subsequently presented laboratory stressor. These results suggest that direct suppression is not necessary for forgetting to occur, but it seems to protect against negative emotional consequences of interference‐induced forgetting. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.