Decreased Effectiveness of a Focused—distraction Strategy in Dysphoric Individuals

摘要

The purpose of the present study was to clarify the mechanism responsible for high frequency,negative intrusive thoughts in dysphoric individuals. Dysphoric and non-dysphoric participants wereasked to suppress their negative thoughts by focusing on a memory task, to simply suppress theirnegative thoughts, or to think about something they of their own choice for 3 minutes. The resultsshowed that dysphoric participants reported intrusive thoughts more frequently than did non-dysphoric participants, only in the focused–distraction condition. There was no significant differencein memory-task performance between dysphoric and non-dysphoric participants. Moreover, com-pared to the non-dypshoric participants, the dysphoric participants reported less reduction insuppression effort when using a focused–distraction strategy, and the maintained effort wascorrelated with the number of negative intrusions. These results indicate that negative intrusionsenter dysphoric individuals' minds, regardless of whether they focus attention on distractors. Themaintenance of suppression-effort may be causally related to these intrusions.