If you don't let it in, you don't have to get it out: Thought preemption as a method to control unwanted thoughts.

ABSTRACT: To attain goals, people must proactively prevent interferences and react to interferences once they occur. Whereas most research focuses on how people deal with external interferences, here we investigate the use of proactive and reactive control in dealing with unwanted thoughts. To examine this question, we asked people to generate an association to each of several repeating cue words, while forbidding the repetition of associations. Reactively rejecting and replacing unwanted repeated associations after they occur entails slower response times. Conversely, proactive control entails constricting the search space and thus faster response times. To gain further insight into different potential proactive thought control mechanisms, we augmented the analysis of raw response times with a nove

SUBMITTER: Fradkin I 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC9282588 | biostudies-literature | 2022 Jul

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature