Testing the Relationship Between Empirical Paradigms of Repression and Suppression

Forgetting is not always passive but can occur due to active memory control. The psychoanalytic construct of repression was one of the first conceptualizations of motivated forgetting. However, the concept of repression implies various working definitions challenging a standardized empirical approach. A corresponding paradigm, consistent with repression as an unconscious process induced by conflicts and maintained by resistance, is the free association (FA) paradigm. Additionally, the think/no-think paradigm (TNT) has been introduced as a new approach to measure a cognitive aspect of repression, that is, the notion of suppression. It is unknown how memory control in the TNT and the FA paradigms relates to each other. Here, we investigated interindividual correlations between memory control in the TNT and the FA paradigms. We partially replicated previous behavioral results for both paradigms but did not find any association of memory control across the two paradigms, suggesting that they measure different processes. Our results call for a more detailed theoretical elaboration of the nature of the complex phenomenon of repression. It appears that repression is critically driven by emotional and conflict-associated factors that go beyond the pure cognitive process of memory inhibition captured in voluntary suppression.