The Effects Of Mood States To The Performance Of Inhibiting Valenced Intrusive Thoughts

According to the strength model of self-regulation, limited resources underlie purposeful response modulation and other acts of self-control. Previous studies showed that suppressing intrusive thoughts, which means exerting self-control, depletes the limited resource and results in ego depletion, leads self-control failure in subsequent self-control task. Negative emotions act the same role as exerting self-control and cause self depletion too. While positive emotions could counteract the depletion causes by exerting self-control or negative emotions. Thought inhibition is a vital aspect of self-regulation, which also will be damaged when self-regulation resource depleted, and emotion can influence inhibition strength too.In the studies of self-regulation field, experimenter often manipulated participants to inhibit intrusive thoughts to test their self-regulation strength. While the targets of intrusive thoughts were either neutral (e.g., not think "white bear"), or valenced but got no parallel to contrast with (e.g., inhibit the fear of death thought). So it still remains unknown that the difference of inhibition performance of participants in different emotions.This study tries to answer the intact question that once the intrusive thoughts are valenced, how will the performance change in suppressing to participants under different state of moods? In the experiment, participants first were induced to different emotions (positive, neutral and negative), then endow valence to intrusive thought target "white bear" by associating it with positive or negative words (to create two parallel intrusive thought targets). Subsequently, participants are instructed to do a free writing task in which they wrote down "whatever comes to their mind," but on a condition that they were not allowed to think of the white bear. However, they were told if they were to have thoughts of a white bear, even though they were attempting not to, they were to make a tally mark in a box on the side of the paper. The number of tall marks is dependent variable of this study, which represents inhibition strength.The result showed that participants' performance of inhibiting negative "white bear" was better than their performance of inhibiting positive one; while emotion has no main effect or interaction effect with valence. It indicates that participants may have stronger motive in suppressing negative valenced intrusive thought target to keep good emotion or preventing further damage to it, which means protect self-regulation resource. The reason of no significant difference of inhibition performance among different emotions may be, the change of self-regulation resource caused by the change of emotion may be renewed in words association procedure. It was the effect of emotion priming instead of sustain of emotion caused the change of self-regulation resource.