What is meant by ‘ironic’ effect of thought suppression?
- Thought suppression requires that we not think about something
- However, you cannot avoid thinking about something without knowing what it is that you do not want to think about
- However, knowing what it is that you do not want to think about is in an of itself thinking
Procedures and outcome of ‘white bear’ experiment
- Daniel Wegner The White Bear Experiment
- Experimenter instructs subject to not think of white bears, but if they do, they are told to hit a bell
- During suppression people were able to think about white bears less but afterwards there was a rebound effect such that they thought about them more
Wegner’s explanation of the effect, and the experimental evidence he cites in favor of his explanation.
• According to Wegner, rebound happens because distractors het hooked to the forbidden thought
• Later they occur naturally and they bring with them the forbidden thought
• Evidence: when Wegner have a focused person a distractor (a red Volkswagen) the rebound effect decreased
• The forbidden thoughts seem to be room or context dependent as evidenced by the white bear experiment
o If you have to suppress something, don’t do it in your normal environment, go somewhere else.
o Then once you go back in your normal environment, you won’t have the cues to provoke rebound.
• Examples
o Secret love affairs tend to come to mind more than open ones
o Playing footsie secretly led to greater feelings of affection that no game or when the game was made known.
o Diary studies, thoughts that a person tried to suppress were highly correlated with thoughts that were intrusive
resource depletion and control; evidence
• Prestested people with a questionnaire
• ½ restricted eaters, ½ not
• everyone was given a preload which could be either small or large
o the idea was that it was a taste preference experience and the subjects were asked to drink a milkshake to make the taste assessment
• then the experiment leaves the room telling the subjects that they can eat as much ice-cream as they’d like
• restricted subjects with small taste: didn’t eat much
• restricted subjects w/ large taste: gorged
• non restricted subjects w/ small taste: ate a lot
• non restricted subjects w/ large taste: didn’t eat much
o supports the ironic idea of suppresision
o possibly the result of some physiologically determined regulatory mechanism that is broken down
• they later did an experiment to determine whether their effect was physiological or psychological
o high calorie vs low calorie
• non-restricted eaters, results depended on the actual calories
if they’d eaten a high calorie shake, they didn’t each much ice cream,
if they’d eaten a low calorie shake, they ate a lot
• restricted eaters, results depended on how much that thought that they ate
if they thought they had eaten a lot of calories in the shake (And hence not broken their diet) they did not eat much ice cream (even if I fact they had eaten a lot of calories)
in contrast, if they thought they had eaten a lot of calories, regardless of whether they had or not, they binged on ice cream
• self-regulated people also tend to have a more elaborate pre-frontal cortex
Be able to describe, in detail the restricted eater’s ‘ice cream’ study of Polivy and Herman. What they did, what they found, and how they disambiguated the two possible explanations (indicating which of these was correct). Be able to describe the important brain correlates of this effect, and how they might relate to the resource depletion model.
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Easterbrook hypothesis
- Spotlight of attention gets significantly smaller as stress occurs
- You see certain things (presumably things that survival specific cues, SEE WEAPON FOCUS) but other things will not be within your field of attention
- You will show signs of blindsight
Yerkes Dodson law
- Looks at your performance as a function of your stress level
- Performance in the morning upon waking up is poor and as you continue to wake and be aroused you performance increases up until to a certain point (this point is the optimal stress level)
- If your stress level is to high, past this optimal stress level, your performance level will be inhibited
- Optimal stress is higher stress for low-performance task
- Average task at very low stress levels
- Medium task at your peak
- Difficult task will result in great deal of stress w/ impairment
- There’s is an optimal level of arousal that allows to you to perform your best, but above or below this, your performance is impaired
weapon focus
• Weapon focus- people focus on the threatening stimulus
hippocampal reaction to stress
- The hippocampus has a high density of stress receptors and it increases in function in accordance with Yerkers Dodson law
- As stress increased, your hippocampus becomes activity until it reaches the threshold and then its performance is impaired
definition of stress
- can be considered anything that puts your body out of homeostasis (injury, illness, extreme changes in external temperature)
- anything that causes this homeostatic imbalance
Holmes Rahe stress scale
- Measures stress according to the number of “Life Change Units” tallied in the past year to give a rough estimate of how stress affects health
- Point values for stressors differentiate for adults & non-adults
- Also relates the amount of stress one suffers to their likelihood to obtaining illness
- Score 300+ at risk of illness
- Score 150-299+ risk of illness is moderate
- Score 150-: only have slight risk of illness
willpower
• ability to excerpt volitional control to overcome the power of the evocate stimulus and better instantiate their own intentions and achieve their own goals
be able to describe the hot and cool system.
hot: emotional, “go”, simple, reflexive, fast, accentuated by stress, stimulus control
cool: cognitive, “know”, complex, reflective, slow, attenuated by stress, self control
what is delay of gratification?
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The marshmallow paradigm
- Children are presented with the option to have 2 oreo cookies or mashmallows
- The experimenter steps outside & says that if the child waits until they get back they can get two
- If the child rings the bell to call the experimenter back in, they only get one
- It only works with 4 years old because 3 year old don’t exercise will power but 5 year olds can wait as long as necessary
How hot and cool systems develop
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how hot and cool systems react to stress.
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be able to explain the purported re-emergence of childhood traumas under conditions of stress.
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Know the factors that affect delay of gratification, the strategies to allow the child to successfully exert willpower, and how hot/cool accounts for these.
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metacognition
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feeling of knowing
• quantified by the gamma correlation
• formula: correct rank comparisons divided by total comparisons
o you count the combinations of signs above its opposites
• how many instances is any plus above any minus
o any time all the pluses are above all the minuses, you have a gamma of 1
o to get a -1 gamma, all minuses must be on top and all pluses must be on the bottom (very rare)
o when subjects don’t know the answer to question they are given multiple
tip of the tongue (including examples, and a model that describes it)
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Confidence judgments
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judgments of learning, immediate and delayed.
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