Repressive Coping and the Directed Forgetting of Emotional Material

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1 Journal of Abnoi 1998, Vol. 107,! Copyright 1998 by I n Psychological Association, Inc. 002l-843X/98fl3.00 Repressive Coping and the Directed Forgetting of Emotional Material Lynn B. Myers and Chris R. Brewin University of London Mick J. Power The University of Edinburgh Using a directed forgetting task, the authors tested in 2 experiments the hypothesis that repressers would be superior to controls in forgetting negative experimental material. Consistent with previous studies, there was an overall directed forgetting effect, with significantly more to-be-remembered material recalled than to-be-forgotten (TBF) material. In both experiments, repressers forgot more negatively valenced words in the TBF set than did nonrepressors, suggesting that repressers have an enhanced capability for using retrieval inhibition. The data offer preliminary support for a cognitive account of repressers' deficits in recalling negative autobiographical memories. Systematic empirical support has recently been accumulating for the idea that in a subset of individuals the occurrence of significant emotional events may be forgotten and then remembered after many years. Recognition of this phenomenon has focused attention on other examples of individual differences in forgetting, in the hope of achieving some insight into the mechanism or mechanisms that might be responsible. One of the most promising lines of research has shown that the memory performance of individuals who possess a repressive coping style violates normal expectations based on cognitive theory. That is, repressors have more difficulty in retrieving negative autobiographical material than nonrepressors (e.g., Davis, 1987; Davis & Schwartz, 1987; Myers, Brewin, & Power, 1992), even though they appear to have experienced more childhood adversity (Myers & Brewin, 1994). The current studies investigate whether repressers' difficulties in accessing negative memories may be explained by a greater capacity to inhibit the retrieval of negative information when requested to do so. Individuals have reported the forgetting and subsequent retrieval of major negative life experiences including childhood abuse in numerous studies (e.g., Briere & Conte, 1993; Elliott & Briere, 1995; Feldman-Summers & Pope, 1994; Herman & Schatzow, 1987; Loftus, Polonsky, & Fullilove, 1994; van der Kolk & Fisler, 1995; Williams, 1994). Although their reports of forgetting are of necessity unsubstantiated, the memories claimed to have been recovered have often attracted supporting verbal or documentary evidence that help to corroborate the events referred to (Andrews, in press; Bagley, 1995; Feldman- Summers & Pope, 1994; Schooler, 1994; Schooler, Ambadar, & Bendiksen, in press; Williams, 1995). Many commentators have Lynn B. Myers, Department of Psychiatry and Behavioural Sciences, University College London Medical School, University of London, London, England; Chris R. Brewin, Department of Psychology, Royal Holloway, University of London, London, England; Mick J. Power, Department of Psychology, The University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, Scotland. This research was supported in part by a United Kingdom Medical Research Council studentship awarded to Lynn B. Myers. Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Lynn B. Myers, Department of Psychiatry and Behavioural Sciences, University College London Medical School, Wolfson Building, 48 Riding House Street, London WIN 8AA England. now concluded that there is persuasive evidence both for genuine recovered memories of this kind of event as well as for the creation of false memories following prolonged, suggestive memory techniques (Brewin, 1996; Lindsay & Read, 1995). Moreover, many experimental psychologists have proposed the existence of inhibitory mechanisms in attention and memory that could potentially account for the genuine forgetting and later retrieval of such memories (e.g., Bjork, 1989; Hasher & Zacks, 1988; Rafal & Henik, 1994; Tipper, 1985; see Brewin & Andrews, in press, for a review). In the late 1970s psychologists identified a group of individuals who were labeled as possessing a repressive coping style. One of the identifying features of repressors, who are typically defined as scoring low on self-report trait anxiety measures but high on self-report measures of defensiveness, is that in potentially stressful situations they are highly physiologically reactive while reporting low levels of distress (e.g., Asendorpf & Scherer, 1983; Gudjonsson, 1981; Weinberger, Schwartz, & Davidson, 1979). They also demonstrate an avoidant attentional style (e.g., Fox, 1993; Myers & McKenna, 1996). Another striking finding is repressers' memory deficit in regard to negative material. In a series of studies, Davis (1987, 1990; Davis & Schwartz, 1987) investigated female repressers' autobiographical memory. During both free and cued recall memory tasks, in which participants were asked to recall personal experiences from any time in their lives, she demonstrated that repressors had difficulties in recalling negative autobiographical memories. We replicated and extended Davis's findings by eliciting childhood memories up until the age of 14 years (Myers et al., 1992). In this study we found that the age of repressers' earliest negative memory was significantly older than that of nonrepressors, that repressors also recalled fewer negative early experiences in a free recall task, and that they took significantly longer to recall negative childhood memories than did nonrepressors in a cued-recall task. Therefore, our results, taken together with those of Davis, indicate that repressors exhibit a limited access to negative autobiographical memory both from childhood and adulthood. In contrast, access to positive memories appeared in these studies to be unaffected. A further study by Myers and Brewin (1994) addressed the possibility that this pattern of recall could be explained by repressors having had fewer unhappy childhood experiences than 141

2 142 MYERS. BREWIN, AND POWER nonrepressors. Using semistructured interviews of childhood experience with female repressers, we found that they reported significantly more paternal antipathy and indifference, and significantly less paternal closeness, compared with nonrepressors. Thus, the evidence suggested not only that repressers had not experienced happier childhoods, but that they had actually had unhappier childhoods than nonrepressors. Subsequent research has addressed the issue of whether repressers possess an information processing style that affects more than their own personal histories. Female repressers and nonrepressors were required to intentionally learn and remember a story containing positive and negative information about mothers and fathers. Repressers remembered significantly fewer negative phrases than did controls, although there were no differences in the recall of positive or neutral material (Myers & Brewin, 1995). The Myers and Brewin (1995) study required recall of a story about parenting that, conceivably, could have been affected by participants' own childhood experiences. Therefore, it is difficult to know whether this finding reflected a more global style of processing negative information. Consequently, at present it is not clear whether the mechanisms responsible for repressers' limited accessibility to negative autobiographical material are specific to autobiographical memories, also affect experimental material related lo these memories, or affect the processing of any negatively valenced material. To test whether repressers possess a more global processing style that affects more than their own personal histories, we therefore carried out two experiments using an incidental recall paradigm. We investigated whether repressers would be superior to nonrepressors at inhibiting the retrieval of a list of negative words using a directed forgetting task. Bjork (1989) proposed an important role for retrieval inhibition as an adaptive mechanism in human memory and suggested that some "repressive" phenomena can be explained in this way. Inhibition in this sense is "directed at the to-be-inhibited information, and it is initiated to achieve some goal (such as... the avoidance of painful recollection)" (Bjork, 1989, p. 325). The principal method for investigating retrieval inhibition is the directed forgetting paradigm, which assesses recall of lists of stimuli such as words that participants have been instructed to forget or remember. There are, typically, two methods used to designate some material as forget and some material as remember. In the list method, midway through presentation of the list, participants are instructed to forget the first half of the list (the to-be-forgotten set, TBF) and to remember the second half of the list (The to-be-remembered set, TBR). In the word method, stimuli are designated TBF or TBR by instructions given directly after individual presentation of each stimulus. Using either method, participants given a surprise recall test of the entire set of stimuli recall less of the TBF set than of the TBR set. Directed forgetting is a well-documented phenomenon that occurs using a variety of paradigms and may involve a variety of processes (e.g., Basden, Basden, & Gargano, 1993; Bjork, 1989; Bjork & Bjork, 1996; Johnson, 1994; MacLeod, 1989; Russo & Andrade, 1995). Recently, this task has been used to investigate individual differences. For example, under certain conditions older adults have been found to be less able than younger adults to suppress TBF items (Zacks, Radvansky, & Hasher, 1996). It has been suggested lhat the method of presenting stimuli is instrumental to whether encoding or retrieval mechanisms are involved in directed forgetting. Basden et al. (1993) argued that when the cue to forget is given in the list method, a reasonable amount of processing would have already been allocated to the TBF items. Therefore, retrieval inhibition is responsible for the directed forgetting. However, in the word method it would seem more likely that encoding and storage would be the probable mechanisms, as there has been little time available for encoding the TBF items. Basden et al. therefore hypothesized that the list method would give a directed forgetting effect only when memory is tested by recall. However, with the word method, differential encoding of the TBF and TBR stimuli would result in poor performance on TBF items both on recall and recognition. Their results supported the hypothesis, with recognition memory only affected with the word method, but recall performance affected for both methods. In addition, on a final free recall test given after the recognition test, participants cued by the word method continued to show a directed forgetting effect, whereas participants cued by the list method now recalled equivalent numbers of TBF and TBR items, suggesting that participants were released from recall inhibition. This finding that a recognition lest reinstates recall in participants cued by the list method had previously been reported by Bjork, Bjork, and Glenberg (1973). As we were interested in whether repressers are superior at retrieval inhibition, the current experiments used the list method. A task solely involving incidental recall was used to guard against the possibility that participants high in social desirability would be more motivated to learn or forget if this was part of the task instructions. It was hypothesized that repressers would retrieve significantly fewer negative words from the TBF set than would nonrepressors but would not differ in their recall of positive words. Method Experiment 1 Participants. These were female undergraduate psychology students from City University and University of Hertfordshire, with ages between 18 and 38 years and a mean age of 21.3 years, chosen from an initial pool of 231 female students. They were the same participants used by Myers and Brewin (1995). Classification of participants based on the Weinberger et al. (1979) definition typically divides individuals into four groups: repressers (low anxiety-high defensiveness), low anxious (low anxiety-low defensiveness), high anxious (high anxiety-low defensiveness), and defensive high anxious (high anxiety-high defensiveness). As previous experiments had indicated that repressors differ from both extreme scoring and nonextreme scoring comparison groups (Myers, 1995; Myers & Brewin, 1996), a composite group of nonrepressors wore identified containing some low anxious participants, some high anxious participants, some defensive high anxious participants, and some nonextreme scoring participants. Trait anxiety was measured using the Bendig short form of the Manifest Anxiety Scale (MAS; Bendig, 1956), and defensiveness was measured by the Marlowe-Crowne Social Desirability Scale (MC; Crowne & Marlowe, 1964). Quartile scores defined repressors, who scored 8 or under on the MAS (M = 5.86) and 17 or over on the MC (M = 19.41). The only potential

3 REPRESSION AND FORGETTING 143 participants that were omitted as "borderline repressers" were those that scored 10 or under on the MAS with a score of 14 or over on the MC. All other participants were designated nonrepressors, and a representative sample of these formed the comparison group. In this way participants who scored outside the range of quartile splits (8 to 12 on the MAS and 10 to 16 on the MC), as well as some extremescoring participants, were included in the comparison group. Their mean MAS score was 12.27, and their mean MC score was 9,79. There were 29 participants in each group. There were no group differences in age, F(l, 56) = 0.51, ns, Experimental materials. Two lists of negative and positive words were presented on slides for 3 s per word with 5 s intervals between presentation. The first list consisted of 3 filler (neutral) words (sensible, quick, moderate), 10 negative words, and 10 positive words, and the second list also consisted of 10 negative words and 10 positive words. Words were all adjectives and were matched for word frequency (Francis & Kucera, 1982), word length, and degree of affect. The words can be found in the Appendix. It was important to confirm that any differential recall of the TBF and TBR words would be a directed forgetting phenomenon rather than a recency effect. Therefore, the two lists of words were presented to a separate baseline forgetting control sample, but without any instructions that any information was to be disregarded or forgotten. These participants were 20 female students who were studying toward a diploma in psychology at Birkbeck College, University of London, and whose mean age was years. Participants were informed that they were taking part in a self-perception task and were asked to rate each word for self-descriptiveness on a 4-point scale, with 4 anchored at very self-descriptive and I anchored al not at all self-descriptive. After the first list was presented, participants were given the second list to rate for self-descriptiveness, after which they completed a mathematical distractor task for 3 min. They were then given a surprise recall task in which they were asked to recall as many words as possible from both lists fin 5 min). The twu sets of words were counterbalanced for order across participants. The baseline forgetting control sample was tested in two groups. A comparison of recall of the two lists by the baseline forgetting control sample indicated that there was no significant difference in mean recall of the first list of negative words (M = 2.80, SD = 1.70) and the second list of negative words (M = 3.00, SD = 1.86), ;(39) , ns. Nor was there any significant difference in mean recall of the first list of positive words (M = 4.65, SD = 1.69) and the second list of positive words (M = 4.80, SD = 1.58), r(39) = 0.62, ns. One-wayanalysis of variance (ANOVA) on the number of words recalled yielded no significant effect for list order, largest F(l, 18) = 0.31, ns. In the absence of a forgetting instruction, therefore, there was no evidence that participants would differentially recall the two lists. Procedure. Participants in the main directed forgetting task were also told they were taking part in a self-perception experiment, with no mention of having to remember the words. They were additionally given the following instructions after presentation of the first list of words: "What you have done so far has been practice. You can forget about those words. 1 will now show you the actual set of test words that I want you to rale for self-descriptiveness in the same way you did for the practice words." The second list was then presented, after which participants completed a mathematical distractor task for 3 min. They were then given a surprise recall task in which they were asked to recall as many words as possible from both lists in 5 min. The two sets of words were counterbalanced for order across participants. Because of a large number of anxiety-related words in the lists, participants then filled in the Multiple Affect Adjective Check List (MAACL; Zuckerman & Lubin, 1965) to check for transient mood effects. The MAACL is a self-administered test, consisting of 21 anxiety items, 40 depression items, and 28 hostility items. There are two forms of this questionnaire: a "general" form and a "today" form. In this study participants had to answer how they felt today. Results and Discussion A 2 (group) X 2 (list order) ANOVA on the number of words recalled yielded no significant effects for list order and no Group X List Order interaction, largest F(l, 56) = 1.07, ns. List order was therefore ignored in subsequent analyses. Recall data from the directed forgetting task are shown in Figure 1. A 2 (recall: TBR vs. TBF) X 2 (valence: positive vs. negative) x 2 (Group: repressor vs. nonrepressor) mixed design ANOV\ on the number of words recalled yielded a significant main effect of recall, F(l, 56) = , p <.001, indicating a substantial directed forgetting effect with fewer adjectives overall being recalled from the first list than from the second list. There was also a significant effect of valence, F( 1, 56) = 22.37, p <.001, indicating that overall more positive words were recalled than negative words. The three-way interaction of Group x Valence x Recall approached significance, F(l, 56) , p <.07. Tb test the specific predictions of the study, we conducted a 2 (recall) X 2 (group) ANOY\ on number of negative words recalled. This yielded a similar significant effect for recall, F( 1, 56) , p <.001, but not for group, F(l, 56) = 0.49, ns. There was a significant Group X Recall interaction, F(l, 56) = 5.81, p <.05. A test of the simple effects of the interaction indicated a significant difference between the two groups for the TBF words, F( 1, 56) = 8.04, p <.005, with repressers recalling fewer negative TBF words than nonrepressors. In contrast, the groups did not differ in the number of TBR negative words recalled, F(l, 56) , ns. Correlations of recall and endorsement. Ratings of the selfdescriptiveness of the 40 adjectives were dichotomized to reflect whether or not the items had been endorsed; the 2 lower rating points indicated that the item was not self-descriptive and the 2 upper rating points indicated that it was self-descriptive. The total number of positive and negative words endorsed was calculated. There were no between-group differences for either the number of negative, F(l, 56) = 0.47, ns, or the number of positive, F(l, 56) = 1.82, ns, words endorsed. Spearman correlations were calculated between the total numbers of positive and negative words endorsed and the probability of recall, in each group separately and in the combined groups. There was one significant but weak correlation: Number of negative words endorsed was negatively correlated with probability of recall of positive words (r ), but only for the nonrepressor group. These correlations were repeated for TBF and TBR items separately. Again, number of negative words endorsed was negatively correlated with probability of recall of positive words (r = -0.40) for the nonrepressor group, but only for TBR words. Effects of mood. There were no differences in MAACL hostility scores between groups, with the mean scores for both groups being The data for the anxiety scores and depression scores were not normally distributed, with a number of participants scoring zero on these scales. Mann-Whitney U tests showed that, compared with nonrepressors, repressors were significantly less anxious, U = 296.5, p <.05, and were less

4 144 MYERS, BREWIN, AND POWER No. of words recalled 5 -> Group Represser Control TBF Negative Words TBR TBF Positive Words TBR Figure 1. Mean number of words recalled in Experiment 1. TBF = to be forgotten; TBR = to be remembered; No. = number. depressed, U = 260.5, p <.05. Analysis of covariance with group as a variable on number of TBF negative words recalled still yielded a significant main effect when controlling for levels of state anxiety, F(l, 55) = 11.86, p <.001, and depression, F(l, 55) = 8.19, p <.005. We found that repressers' incidental recall of negative material that was apparently irrelevant and to-be-forgotte/i was significantly worse than that of nonrepressors. The recall effect in the directed forgetting task could not be explained by differential endorsement of negative adjectives by participants, as probability of recall and endorsement of self-descriptiveness were only weakly correlated in one instance. Similarly, repressers' low recall of TBF negative material continued to be significant when MAACL anxiety and depression were partialled out, indicating that transient mood had a minimal effect on recall. It is of interest that repressers were no worse than nonrepressors at recalling the TBR negative material, as this suggests there may be specific rather than global deficits in recalling negative material. Experiment 2 Even though Experiment 1 demonstrated that repressers differed from nonrepressors in their recall of TBF negative words, no conclusion could be made as to whether this difference was due to their unique combination of low trait anxiety and high defensiveness. This was because of a lack of a direct comparison between repressers and the other low anxiety group (low anxious) and the other high defensive group (defensive high anxious). Therefore, Experiment 2 was designed to replicate Experiment 1 and, additionally, to investigate whether repressers would retrieve significantly fewer negative words from the TBF set compared with low anxious, high anxious, and defensive high anxious participant groups separately. This experiment therefore constituted a more rigorous test of the hypothesis. Method Participants. The participants were female undergraduate psychology students from Royal Holloway, University of London, with ages between 18 and 48 years and a mean age of years, chosen from an initial pool of 97 students. Third splits on the MAS and MC defined four groups: repressers (mean MAS score = 3.38, mean MC score = 17.77), low anxious (mean MAS score = 5.27, mean MC score = 7.91), high anxious (mean MAS score , mean MC score ). and defensive high anxious group (mean MAS score 14.09, mean MC score ). There were 13 participants in the repressor group, 11 in the low anxious group, 11 participants in the high anxious group, and 11 participants in the defensive high anxious group. There were no group differences in age, F(3, 54) = 0.94, ns. Experimental materials and procedure. These were identical to those of Experiment 1. As transient mood had minimal effect previously, it was not measured in this experiment. Results and Discussion A4(group) X 2 (list order)anova on the number of words recalled yielded no significant effects for list order and no

5 REPRESSION AND FORGETTING 145 No. of words recalled TBF Negative Words TBR TBF Positive Words TBR Figure 2. Mean number of words recalled in Experiment 2. TBF = to be forgotten; TBR = to be remembered; R = represser; LA = low anxious; HA = high anxious; DHA = defensive high anxious; No. = number. Group X List Order interaction, largest F(3, 40) = 1.72, ns. List order was therefore ignored in subsequent analyses. Recall data from the directed forgetting task are shown in Figure 2. Tb compare the data with Experiment 1, we initially compared repressers with an aggregate of the three nonrepressor groups. A 2 (recall: TBR vs. TBF) X 2 (valence: positive vs. negative) X 2 (group: represser vs. nonrepressor) mixed design ANOVA on the number of words recalled yielded a significant main effect of recall, F(l, 44) = 71.24, p <.001, indicating a substantial directed forgetting effect with significantly fewer adjectives overall being recalled from the first list than from the second list. There was also a significant effect of valence, F( 1, 44) = 9.91, p <.01, indicating that overall more positive words were recalled than negative words. There was a significant effect of group, F(l, 44) 6.23, p <.05. The three-way interaction of Group X Valence X Recall approached significance, F( 1, 44) = 3.60, p =.06. A 2 (recall) x 2 (group) ANO\A on number of negative words recalled yielded similar results to Experiment 1, with a significant effect for recall, F(l, 44) = 35.02, p <.001, a significant effect for group, F(l, 44) = 11.22, p <.01, and a significant Group X Recall interaction, F(l, 44) = 8.44, p <.01. The simple effects of the interaction were tested using a one-way ANOVA. There was a significant difference between the two groups for the TBF words, F( 1, 44) = 23.07,p <.001, with repressers recalling fewer TBF negative words than the nonrepressor group. In contrast, the groups did not differ in the number of TBR negative words recalled, F(l, 44) = 0.05, ns. Similarly, there were no significant differences in recall of the TBF positive and TBR positive words, F(l, 44) = 0.43, ns, and F(l, 44) = 0.52, ns, respectively. To test the prediction that repressors would differ from the separate nonrepressor groups on recall of negative words, we then carried out a 2 (recall) X 4 (group) ANOVA on number of negative words recalled for repressors, low anxious, high anxious, and defensive high anxious participants. This yielded a similar significant effect of recall, F(3, 42) = 23.66, p <.001, a significant effect of group, F(3, 42) = 3.60, p <.05, and a significant Group X Recall interaction, F(3, 42) = 2.91, p <.05. The simple effects of the interaction were tested using an ANOVA, accompanied by Newman-Keuls post hoc tests with significance levels set at p <.05. There was a significant difference between the groups for the TBF words, F(3, 42) = 7.53, p <.001, with repressors recalling fewer TBF negative words than all three nonrepressor groups. In contrast, the groups did not differ in the number of TBR negative words recalled, F(3, 42) = 0.45, ns. Similarly, there were no significant differences for recall of TBF positive and TBR positive words, F(3, 42) = 0.11, ns, and F(3, 42) = 0.26, ns, respectively. Correlations of recall and endorsement. As in Experiment I, ratings of the self-descriptiveness of the 40 adjectives were dichotomized, and the total number of positive and negative

6 146 MYERS, BREWIN, AND POWER words endorsed was calculated. There were no between-group differences for either the number of negative, F(3, 42) = 0.68, ns, or the number of positive, F(3, 42) = 1.44, ns, words endorsed. Spearman correlations were calculated between the total numbers of positive and negative words endorsed and the probability of recall, in each group separately and in the combined groups. There were no significant correlations. These correlations were repeated for TBF and TBR items separately, once again without finding any significant associations. As in Experiment 1, we found that repressers' incidental recall of negative TBF material was significantly worse than that of nonrepressors. This result was shown when repressers were compared with both (a) an aggregate of nonrepressors and (b) low anxious, high anxious, and defensive high anxious participants separately. Once again, the recall effect in the directed forgetting task could not be explained by differential endorsement of negative adjectives by participants, as probability of recall and endorsement of self-descriptiveness were not significantly correlated. Unexpectedly, repressers did not differ from the other groups in their endorsement of positive or negative adjectives in either Experiments 1 or 2. However, the effect of mood on endorsement is strongly dependent on what is meant by an adjective being "self-descriptive." For example, depressed patients, relative to controls, are more likely to endorse negative adjectives as being true of them in the past week, or generally, but these group differences are no longer present when participants are asked to rate whether these adjectives have been true of them at any time (Brewin, Smith, Power, & Furnham, 1992). It is possible that in these experiments, participants similarly interpreted the selfdescriptiveness task as requiring a judgment about whether the adjectives had been true of them at any time. General Discussion The current experiments provide additional evidence that repressers have poorer recall, not only for negative autobiographical memories but also for negative experimental material. Repressers' incidental recall of negative material that was apparently irrelevant and to-be-forgotten was significantly worse than that of nonrepressors. The recall effect in the directed forgetting task could not be explained by differential endorsement of negative adjectives by participants, as probability of recall and endorsement of self-descriptiveness were only weakly correlated in one instance in Experiment 1, and not significantly correlated in Experiment 2. It would be interesting to investigate in further experiments whether the self-referent dimension of the task (rating adjectives for self-descriptiveness) is crucial in obtaining selective forgetting. Previous studies do not allow any conclusions about whether self-relevance is an important issue for samples of repressers. For example, Davis (1987, Experiment 1) demonstrated that in free recall of autobiographical memories, repressers were poorer at recall than nonrepressors when emotional memories involved self but not when the memories involved others. In addition, further evidence suggests that the dissociation between self-report and physiological measures of distress shown by repressors may be activated by psychologically threatening situations in which attention is directed to the self (Newton & Contrada, 1992). However, a number of studies that have demonstrated repressers' avoidant processing strategies did not use explicitly self-referent material (Bonnano, Davis, Singer, & Schwartz, 1991; Fox, 1993; Myers & McKenna, 1996). If, as suggested by the findings of Bjork et al. (1973) and Basden et al. (1993), recall of TBF words in a list version of the directed forgetting task is due to retrieval inhibition, it may be concluded that repressors are better at limiting access to negative TBF words through retrieval inhibition. This conclusion would be stronger had we explicitly confirmed in our study that repressers were no poorer in recognizing negative TBF words and that presentation of some TBF items released the hypothesized inhibition. It is also of interest that in both our experiments repressors were no worse than nonrepressors at recalling the TBR negative material, as this suggests there may be specific rather than global deficits in recalling negative material. However, the fact that they have also been shown to be poorer at the intentional learning of negative material (Myers & Brewin, 1995) indicates that other mechanisms may be used by repressors. Whether repressors would demonstrate differential forgetting on the word method version of the directed forgetting task remains a topic for future work. Although our findings are limited by the fact that the relationship between clinical accounts of the repression of traumatic memories and the repressive coping style is as yet unknown, the possibility that some phenomena generally observed in the clinic may have parallels that can be studied in the laboratory is intriguing and suggests promising research opportunities. It is possible that a subset of individuals who have been traumatized in childhood might also display superior directed forgetting. Cloitre, Cancienne, Brodsky, Dulit, and Perry (1996) investigated directed forgetting using the word method in a sample of women patients with borderline personality disorder and a history of childhood abuse. Relative to controls, these patients showed equivalent forgetting but enhanced recall of the TBR items, suggesting an ability for improving recall of targeted items through encoding or storage processes. Further work is required to investigate directed forgetting using the list method in clinical samples. As noted by Erdelyi (1990), clinical repression has been considered both as a completely unconscious defense mechanism and as an initially conscious strategy to banish unwanted thoughts from consciousness that becomes automatized. Cognitive scientists have proposed a number of mechanisms, particularly involving inhibitory processes in attention and memory, that could account for these observations (e.g., Brewin & Andrews, in press; Freyd, 1996; Power & Brewin, 1991). Our results are relevant to the second, strategic, usage of the term repression, which has also been referred to as motivated forgetting. Although it should be emphasized that real-life traumas are qualitatively very different from the kinds of task studied in the laboratory, our data support the possibility that retrieval inhibition may underlie some instances in which individual clients, having been instructed either by themselves or others to forget negative life events, report long periods of being unable to access these memories. It might appear that this explanation might not fully account for long-term forgetting because over time individuals would presumably be regularly reexposed to cues that would release this inhibition. However, mere exposure

7 REPRESSION AND FORGETTING 147 to TBF cues is not sufficient to release such inhibition; rather, the forgotten material must be processed in a manner that accesses, or makes contact with, the initial learning episode (Bjork & Bjork, 1996). Such findings make retrieval inhibition a much more plausible explanation for real-world, long-term forgetting and provide a valuable illustration of how experimental cognitive psychology may be able to inform our understanding of the forgetting of trauma. References Andrews, B. (1997). Farms of memory recovery among adults in therapy. In D. Read & D. S. Lindsay (Eds.), Recollections of trauma: Scientific research and clinical practice (pp ). New ferk: Plenum Press. Asendorpf, J. A., & Scherer, K. R. (1983). The discrepant represser: Differentiation between low anxiety, high anxiety, and repression of anxiety by autonomic-facial-verbal patterns of behavior. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 45, Bagley, C. ( 1995). 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