Memory suppression and its deficiency in psychological disorders: A focused meta-analysis.
Davide Francesco Stramaccia, Ann-Kristin Meyer, Katharina Miriam Rischer, Jonathan M. Fawcett, Roland G. Benoit
Abstract
procedure to test SIF in individuals either affected by psychological disorders or exhibiting high scores on related traits. Overall, across 96 effects from 25 studies, we found that avoiding retrieval leads to significant forgetting in healthy individuals, with a small to moderate effect size (0.28, 95% CI [0.14, 0.43]). Importantly, this effect was indeed larger than for more anxious (-0.21, 95% CI [-0.41, -0.02]) or depressed individuals (0.05, 95% CI [-0.19, 0.29])-though estimates for the healthy may be inflated by publication bias. In contrast, individuals with a stronger repressive coping style showed greater SIF (0.42, 95% CI [0.32, 0.52]). Furthermore, moderator analyses revealed that SIF varied with the exact suppression mechanism that participants were instructed to engage. For healthy individuals, the effect sizes were considerably larger when instructions induced specific mechanisms of direct retrieval suppression or thought substitution than when they were unspecific. These results suggest that intact suppression-induced forgetting is a hallmark of psychological well-being, and that inducing more specific suppression mechanisms fosters voluntary forgetting. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).