Final Essay Paper

Running head: LEARNING, REMEMBERING AND BELIEVING: ENHANCING

HUMAN PERFORMANCE

THE CONTEXTUALIZATION OF SUPPRESSED THOUGHTS

Caron Ragland

University of Phoenix

My current Issue in Life-Span Development paper deals with the Cognitive Thinking Development of Learning, Remembering and Believing. How can people enhance human performance for thought suppression? In everyday life people often sometimes think they can control their thoughts, emotions, behaviors, or their performance. But it is very clear to see that in everyday life the control of mental activity meets with some success. People can study at will; sometimes remove bothersome worries from their minds; relaxing can sometimes be good; sometimes we get aroused, or sometimes the mood gets better; they may even seem to reduce their thoughts of food by doing a diet or maybe trying to quit smoking. When people have loss a loved one, grieving sometimes conclude that their ultimate recovery was the result of putting the loss out of their mind. Within a certain distance in everyday life usually the people can exercise some mental control (Wegner and Schneider, 1989).

The controversies associated with this issue on thought suppression is considered some form of intentional avoidance of a thought or category of thoughts: (for example, “I don’t want to think about dieting, or I don’t want to think about my job.” This kind of suppression can be distinguished from thought suppression that occurs in the service of intentional attention to something else. (Wegner and Schneider (1989) distinguished between primary and auxiliary suppression: when one suppresses a thought simply to avoid that thought, they termed it primary thought suppression; when one suppresses a thought in order to focus on something else, it is auxiliary thought suppression. Primary thought suppression is, in some sense, more troublesome than auxiliary thought suppression. Rather than having a handy...