The call of the wild thought: Mental control and liking.

摘要

This thesis explores the hypothesis that suppressing thoughts of an object may influence preference for this object. Drawing from past research on mental control and mere exposure (Zajonc, 1968), a theoretical model of mere mental exposure was developed. This model maintains that thought suppression heightens the cognitively accessibility of an unwanted thought following the attempt to suppress this thought (Wegner, Schneider, Carter, & White, 1987)---thus, when individuals encounter objects relevant to the unwanted thought following suppression, processing of these objects will be facilitated and the source of fluency may be misattributed to liking (Bornstein & D'Agostino, 1994). Two experiments tested the proposed theory. In Experiment 1, participants were asked to rate their liking of a neutral target object after suppressing thoughts of this object, expressing thoughts of this object, or simply reporting their thoughts. The target objects in Experiment 2 were positive or negative. It was predicted that preference for each target object would increase following thought suppression. The data did not confirm these hypotheses at conventional testing levels, but were in the predicted direction with regard to the neutral and positive objects. Contrary to predictions, preference for the negative target decreased nonsignificantly.