Daniel Wegner - US grants

The conscious suppression of a thought is a difficult thing to do. Just trying for a few minutes not to think of white bear, for example, can be perplexing. But people seem intent on trying to suppress unwanted thoughts nonetheless. Thoughts of frightening events or depressing losses are targets of suppression, and people also may suppress thoughts of food, alcohol, or other temptations they hope to avoid. This research explores thought suppression by asking people to suppress thoughts under various laboratory conditions. Prior studies have shown that when people try to do this, they usually are capable of avoiding the target thought after a while by distracting themselves with other things. The studies in the project address two fundamental questions about this process. How does self.distraction operate, and what consequences can thought suppression be expected to have? The studies of how self.distraction operates examine how people suppress thoughts most effectively, and thus these studies have implications for the treatment of alcohol and substance addiction. The studies of the consequences of thought suppression focus on the possibility that suppressed thoughts may influence a person's thinking, emotions, and social interactions..even though the thoughts are seemingly absent. Thought suppression may make an unwanted thought more easily brought to mind, may make exciting thoughts unusually likely to produce physiological agitation and anxiousness, and may promote such preoccupation with the unwanted thought that people find they cannot steer their social interactions in the directions they wish them to go. Taken together, these studies will introduce new knowledge on whether and when people should use thought suppression, and the consequences..both agreeable and harmful.that can be expected as a result.

Effective social interaction requires that people often try to influence their own minds. Mental control is a term for such self-regulation of mental states. People engage in mental control when they try to stop thinking about something, when they attempt to avoid unwanted or inappropriate emotions or desires, and when they try to create such states as well. The goal of this project is to test and refine a theory of ironic processes of mental control. According to this theory, any attempt to control the mind introduces both an operating process that promotes the intended change and an ironic process that tends to counteract this change. The operating process requires greater cognitive capacity than the ironic process, so mental control only works as intended when people have sufficient cognitive capacity. When they are distracted or under a stress that introduces cognitive load, their attempts to control their minds will regularly yield precisely the ironic opposite of what they intend. This idea is applied here to several domains of mental control with both personal and social consequences: The control of arousal, pain, depression, prejudice, and self-esteem. For each of these domains, studies are planned to examine what happens when people try to exert control over their minds with or without the presence of distracting cognitive loads. The specific aims of the project include (1) testing the generality of the theory across these various domains, and (2) refining the theory through studies designed to examine the limiting conditions for ironic effects. If the proposed research is conducted, it should have several key implications for mental health. Ironic processes of mental control may be implicated in the etiology of psychological disorders such as depression, anxiety, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and sleep disorders, and may also underlie social interactional problems that arise from errors in the control of socially inappropriate behavior.

DESCRIPTION (Applicant's Abstract): Effective social interaction and personal adaptation requires that people often try to influence their own minds. People engage in such mental control when they try to stop thinking about something, for example, or when they attempt to avoid unwanted or inappropriate emotions or desires. Attempts to control mental states often fail, however, and past research suggests that this happens because mental control produces ironic processes unconscious failure-monitoring processes that promote the appearance of the mental states people most hope to avoid. This is why unwanted thoughts and emotions often arise at precisely the worst times. The specific aim of this project is to see whether such ironic processes are overcome when mental control is practiced repeatedly and becomes automatized Like any practiced skill, mental control should become more effective with rehearsal, and this research examines its possibility by focusing both on rehearsal of mental control in the laboratory and on the testing of special populations who are likely to have engaged in chronic mental control in the past. But also like any skill that has become automatic, mental control can be disrupted whenever the person renews conscious control and monitoring of the process. This fragile automaticity hypothesis is tested in these studies, to see whether remembering that one is trying to control one's mind can reintroduce ironic thoughts and emotions even after mental control has become automatic. This research should have several key implications for mental health. The automatization of mental control processes, and its accompanying fragile automaticity, may be implicated in the etiology of depression, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and eating disorders, and may also underlie social interfactional problems that arise from error in the control of socially inappropriate behavior.

DESCRIPTION (Applicant's Abstract): Effective social interaction and personal adaptation requires that people often try to influence their own minds. People engage in such mental control when they try to stop thinking about something, for example, or when they attempt to avoid unwanted or inappropriate emotions or desires. Attempts to control mental states often fail, however, and past research suggests that this happens because mental control produces ironic processes unconscious failure-monitoring processes that promote the appearance of the mental states people most hope to avoid. This is why unwanted thoughts and emotions often arise at precisely the worst times. The specific aim of this project is to see whether such ironic processes are overcome when mental control is practiced repeatedly and becomes automatized Like any practiced skill, mental control should become more effective with rehearsal, and this research examines its possibility by focusing both on rehearsal of mental control in the laboratory and on the testing of special populations who are likely to have engaged in chronic mental control in the past. But also like any skill that has become automatic, mental control can be disrupted whenever the person renews conscious control and monitoring of the process. This fragile automaticity hypothesis is tested in these studies, to see whether remembering that one is trying to control one's mind can reintroduce ironic thoughts and emotions even after mental control has become automatic. This research should have several key implications for mental health. The automatization of mental control processes, and its accompanying fragile automaticity, may be implicated in the etiology of depression, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and eating disorders, and may also underlie social interfactional problems that arise from error in the control of socially inappropriate behavior.

[unreadable] DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Effective personal adaptation and social life depend on our ability to discern our own actions and thoughts from those of others. This is not always a simple discrimination, and it is fortunate that our own actions and thoughts are usually marked with a unique feeling, an experience of conscious will. This feeling separates our actions and thoughts from those that seem to have been done or thought by others or caused by events in the world. This research tests a theory of apparent mental causation, which suggests that this experience of conscious will arises when we infer that our thoughts have caused our actions. According to this theory, we are likely to experience conscious will for what we do when we have thoughts that are consistent with what we do, when these thoughts occur just before what we do, and when other potential causes of what we do are not obvious to us. These principles of consistency, priority, and exclusivity suggest why and when people might experience conscious will erroneously--feeling that they controlled an action, for example, when they did not, or feeling that they did not perform an action when in fact they did. Seventeen studies examine conditions that create these illusions by testing the role of these principles in the experience of conscious will. They focus on this experience in everyday actions, as well as in laboratory settings that allow the precise determination of the influence of the principles. Some of the studies test the principles in the case of the vicarious experience of will for the actions of others, and others examine how these principles can yield an understanding of unwilled actions. A final set of studies explores the relationship between processes of action production and processes underlying the experience of will. One such study investigates a clinical application of the theory by assessing how patients with obsessive-compulsive disorder can be influenced to understand their own mental control processes, and so to reduce the intrusive thoughts and unwilled actions that are symptoms of this disorder.

This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5).

We can not perceive other minds the way we perceive our own. So, we can not look into the mind of a patient in a persistent vegetative state to see if "someone is home," just as we can not really know what is going on in the mind of an infant or an animal, or even figure out if it makes any sense to think of a computer as having a mind. Mind perception can be profoundly puzzling, and this research pursues the recent finding that people usually try to solve the puzzle by perceiving minds in terms of two fundamental dimensions -- a mind's capacity for experience (Can it feel things?) and a mind's capacity for agency (Can it do things?). People see normal adult humans as having both experience and agency, whereas they see some kinds of minds primarily as having experiences (e.g., babies), others mainly in terms of agency (e.g., robots), and yet others as having little of either (e.g., a person in a persistent vegetative state). To examine how experience and agency are perceived, this research focuses a series of experiments and large online surveys on how these two dimensions shape judgments of people and other entities with various kinds of minds. The studies explore how mind perception can be biased by exposure to particular kinds of minds, how mind perception breaks down when perceivers are under mental load or stress, how judgments of the quality of a person's life can depend on the dimensions, how the dimensions contribute to judgments of humanness, and how they influence the way different minds are treated in a moral sense--for example, holding them responsible for actions or extending them help when they are in trouble. The findings are expected to offer new insight into the ways people understand entities in the world that may have minds, but whose status is puzzling because they do not conform easily to the way we conceptualize the normal adult human mind.

This project marks an attempt to consider scientifically some of the more profound and difficult moral questions we face as a species. Issues of where we ought to draw the line in perceiving minds -- the minds of children, animals, brain-damaged people, or even computers -- can be informed by examining where and how we do draw a line. In exploring how people go about deciding that something has a mind, this research illuminates key conditions that can increase and decrease mind perception, and sets the foundation for identifying the brain areas implicated in these perceptual processes. Findings from this research can have significant social impact by revealing how mind perception can be improved: for example, how physicians can be trained to perceive the minds of patients with appropriate empathy, or how teachers can be guided to appreciate the minds of students in ways that will help the students to learn. Finally, because deficits in mind perception may accompany mental disorders, this research can also be useful to inform psychological treatment programs for disorders such as autism, personality disorders, and schizophrenia. It has often been hypothesized that psychological treatments can be effective when they remedy specific lapses in mind perception abilities, but this research offers new ways to understand the influence of such treatments that may substantially enhance their chances of success.