Association for Contextual Behavioral Science

I should add, re the processes involved in suppression: When you are trying to suppress a phrase such as 'white bear' then when checking whether you are suppressing successfully, it is not just that you must derive a difference relation between 'non-white bear' stimuli and 'white bear' and that hence you must contact 'white bear'. It is also the case that now the stimuli which are 'non white bear' stimuli are in direct mutually entailed relations with 'white bear' and thus contacting those stimuli is more likely to produce 'white bear' even if you don't check. The more of your relational network in accordance with which you derive in the attempt to not think of 'white bear' the more of your relational network that may become directly related with white bear, no matter how apparently unrelated with 'white bear' those stimuli might have started out as being.

This rebound suppression effect probably goes even more so if the functions of the to be avoided stimulus are, for example, powerful emotional functions such as sadness or anxiety, since the newly derived relations between the elements of your network and the 'to be suppressed' emotional material means that the emotional functions are also contacted more frequently via such derived relations and may become conditioned to the previously neutral elements purely because they are in turn related to the to-be-avoided phrase.

Hi,

Not only does creating a language taboo do nothing to rid one of a thought. It almost certainly makes things worse because the taboo subject or phrase becomes important in proportion to the 'wrongness' of it's emission. In RFT terms, an offending term such as 'coon' is probably in well trained relations of co-ordination with 'bad', 'politically incorrect', 'inappropriate' etc. It is in opposition to 'good' and to 'socially acceptable' and of course if I say or perhaps even just think it (depending on how strong the context of literality is for a person) then I myself may acquire the functions of 'bad', 'racist' etc. as well. Thus, the taboo phrase is prominent in my relational repertoire, and may be more or less so depending on how prominent it has been in my history of relational learning.

Trying to suppress such terms deliberately probably makes things worse again. This could be a good example of thought supression and the 'rebound' from that supression. It is not necessarily the case that the newscaster tried to suppress racial terms or even thought about doing so. This effect can be explained even without suppression. However, suppression of some sort would probably have increased the chances of something like this happening.

Re suppression, Wegner et al. (1987) reported that subjects asked to supress thoughts of a white bear found it difficult and actually reported more 'white bear' thoughts than those not asked to do so. An RFT explanation of this effect might be as follows. First, the rule provided is 'Do not think of a white bear'. However, in order to understand and follow this rule, there is a transformation of the functions of the stimulus phrase 'white bear' in which case you DO think of a white bear. Furthermore, in order to follow the rule anything else that one thinks of must be in a difference relation with 'white bear'. In order to check that one is rule following one must make sure that this is the case. Thus, imagine I think of 'red rose'. In order to make sure I am following the rule I must at some level confirm that 'red rose' is okay because is is in a relation of difference with 'white bear'. However, now there is a transformation of the functions of 'white bear' again. We might try to suppress by perhaps giving up the idea of checking. Perhaps we might skip from thought to thought 'blindly' by simply deriving any and all relations in quick succession. However, now we are no longer aware of whether or not we are rule following. Plus the fact that 'white bear' is a salient element in our recent pattern of relational responding makes it more likely than normal that we will emit this response or a similar response (i.e., thru' generalization) again.

In the case of the newscaster, this may have been suppression if he framed somewhat along the following lines - 'I am speaking about Condoleeza Rice who is a non white person and therefore I must make sure not to say anything politically incorrect or controversial'. If he did have such a thought (and he may well have done) then that of course would transform the functions of 'Condoleeza Rice' such that it would acquire the functions of several other racially sensitive terms and make these terms more likely to be emitted when 'Condoleeza Rice' or 'African American' are emitted. In the report, the offensive sentence was in fact a relation of co-ordination between 'African American' and 'coon' which is a relation of co-ordination in many contexts. He meant to say 'boon' of course, but because there is non arbitrary similarity between that and the offending term and because the two terms ('African American' and 'coon') are also in an arbitarily applicable relational frame of co-ordination in many contexts the emission of the offending term may have been at a high strength.

As I suggested earlier, perhaps he didn't even try to deliberately suppress. Perhaps just the two relations I've just suggested were enough even in the absence of any kind of deliberate suppression to produce the offending sentence.

Ian.