A Research On Implicit Traits Of Motivated Inhibition

Repression theory is the foundation that underlies the structure of psychodynamics. Due to various methodologies adopted, there is still no clear consensus on the concept of repression, its theoretical system and its evaluation. Major of disagreement include:How to test the motivated unconsciousness hypothesis of repression? How to evaluate the existence of repression? What are the adaptive and non-adaptive features of repression? Based on the literature review, the present study first clarifies the concepts of repression, suppression and defense mechanism in terms of psychodynamics, and the concept of inhibition in terms of modern cognition theory, as well as the relationships among those concepts. Then, the concepts of implicit repression and explicit repression are discussed from perspective of implicit social cognition, and categorized as motivated inhibition. Different from previous repression research that used self-report measurement, the present study conducted a series of experiments that adopted methods and techniques of research on implicit social cognition, such as subliminal priming, signal detection technology, go/no-go association task, process dissociation procedure and sentence unscrambling task. The participants in the present study were randomly selected from normal population.Experiment1and Experiment2focuses on verifying the implicit nature of repression, and its memory effect. Experiment3and Experiment4explores the correlation between implicit repression and explicit repression by means of task dissociation and process dissociation procedure respectively. Experiment5and Experiment6both manipulates variant of implicit repression and explicit repression, aiming to investigates their impact on mental adaptation such as emotional reaction and interpersonal adaptation. Following conclusions are drawn from those findings:(1) Repression demonstrates implicit traits. There is effect of subliminal priming on repression. It is inconsistent between the implicit response bias and explicit memory effect of repression; subliminally primed repression mainly affects the reaction bias of emotional stimuli, particularly the automatic reaction bias of negative emotional stimuli.(2) In both situations of work and recess, the effect of GNAT on repression is demonstrated; internal conflict is the major content of repression. Implicit repression and explicit repression are two separate psychological structures, independent from each other.(3) Repression bias could be acquired by means of learning. Once repression bias memory is formed, contributions of conscious recollection and automatic influences can be separated by means of process dissociation procedure. The automatic influence of repression bias memory is not significantly affected by rational and intuitive response formats, whereas conscious recollection of repression bias memory under rational response format is significantly more than that under intuitive response format.(4) Both implicit repression and explicit repression reduce the self-reported negative emotional experience, and implicit repression reduces the active physiological response to negative emotion while explicit repression enhances it. Both implicit repression and explicit repression reduce the negative perceptions of acceptance under low social acceptance conditions. Simultaneously, implicit repression also reduces the willingness to social network under low social acceptance condition. By extension, it impacts the ability of social interaction.In order to understand deep about the form of maladaptation among individual repression, the defense mechanisms of repression and relevant intervention measures in clinical counseling are analyzed in two case studies (one is involved with obsessive-compulsive disorder; and the other is social avoidance.). Conclusions are made on the effects of different conscious levels of repression on adaptive reactions. Findings show that implicit and explicit repression may exert different influences upon mental adaption. Under the threat of self-conflict, adaptive and mala-adaptive behaviors are likely to be generated by implicit repression and explicit repression. The inadequate repression, inappropriate repression and dissonant repression with other mechanisms can all be considered as a form of maladaptation.