white bear research paper

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Taming the white bear: Lowering reactance pressures enhances thought suppression

Matthew wallaert.

1 Department of Psychology, Swarthmore College, Swarthmore, PA, United States of America

Andrew Ward

2 Department of Psychology, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN, United States of America

Associated Data

Data will be posted to OSF website ( https://osf.io/dashboard ) upon acceptance for publication.

Individuals fail to suppress certain thoughts, especially under conditions that tax cognitive resources. We investigated the impact of modifying psychological reactance pressures on thought suppression attempts. Participants were asked to suppress thoughts of a target item under standard experimental conditions or under conditions designed to lower reactance pressures. In the presence of high cognitive load, weakening associated reactance pressures resulted in greater success at suppression. The results suggest that reducing relevant motivational pressures can facilitate thought suppression, even when an individual experiences cognitive limitation.

Introduction

The desire to suppress thoughts constitutes a basic need long recognized in the psychological literature [ 1 ]. Yet individuals sometimes fail at suppression, ending up thinking the very thought they had intended to eschew. In groundbreaking work, Wegner and colleagues demonstrated that asking research participants to “try not to think of a white bear” resulted in subsequent rebound of such thoughts [ 2 ]. Wegner et al. explained these findings principally in terms of coming to associate the to-be-suppressed thought with cues both in the immediate environment and in participants’ recent memory—cues used as distracters away from the target item. Those cues subsequently prompted thoughts of the suppression target, particularly after the prohibition to avoid the target had been lifted [ 3 ].

Since the publication of the original “white bear” study, additional accounts have been offered for the post-suppression rebound effect. Among them are repeated priming of the unwanted thought [ 4 ]; construct accessibility stemming from an uncompleted suppression goal [ 5 ]; and inferring a need to express a construct one has found difficult to suppress [ 6 ].

Notably, however, in the typical study, participants exhibit occasional failures at avoiding the target thought during the suppression task itself, not just during the post-suppression period [ 2 ]. Such initial failures at suppression, that is, failures that occur immediately upon the start of the task, would seem to require a different explanation than those described above—one that, for example, does not depend on the existence of past failures. After all, explanations that rely on repeated priming of forbidden material or on the putative need to express a construct one has already found challenging to suppress cannot explain why one initially experiences suppression failure.

In 1994 Wegner offered such an explanation [ 7 ], alluded to in earlier publications [ 8 , 9 ], arguing that instructions to suppress a thought set up competing processes: an operating process, which attempts to avoid the relevant target, and a monitoring process, which periodically tests whether the operating process has succeeded. Wegner further argued that the monitoring process is essentially automatic, requiring relatively few cognitive resources. By contrast, the operating process represents a controlled process [ 10 , 11 ], requiring more resources, and thus is vulnerable to any degradations in cognitive capacity. When one can devote one’s attention to engaging the operating process, that process is likely to be relatively successful, resulting in few suppression failures. By contrast, the imposition of cognitive load is likely to impair the operating process while leaving the monitoring process relatively intact, resulting in the target of the monitoring process, namely, the forbidden thought, emerging into consciousness. Thus, when asked to perform a cognitively demanding task, such as memorizing a nine-digit number [ 12 ], an individual who is also trying not to think of a white bear is likely to experience near-immediate failure at the suppression task.

Of course, in their earliest work in this area, Wegner and his colleagues did indeed focus on “ironic rebound” of formerly suppressed material that occurred during a post-suppression period [ 2 ]. More recently, this post-suppression rebound has also been the focus of work by other researchers, including Förster and Liberman and their colleagues [ 6 , 13 – 15 ]. However, later investigations by Wegner and his colleagues in the domain of thought suppression centered on concurrent suppression failure [ 12 , 16 – 18 ]. Although the model we are proposing and sought to test here may well apply to instances of post-suppression rebound, note that the focus of the studies reported in this article is exclusively on concurrent thought suppression failures under conditions of cognitive load.

Wegner’s cognitive account notwithstanding, are there other ways through which the imposition of cognitive load can impair the ability to suppress thoughts? In particular, might motivational processes also play a key role in many initial suppression failures? And if so, do they suggest ways to improve one’s ability to avoid certain thoughts?

Similar to Wegner [ 7 ], we contend that the attempt to suppress thoughts of a stimulus often triggers competing forces that both foster and inhibit suppression success. However, we argue that factors other than the presence of a basic operating and monitoring process can play a role in such suppression—factors that include motivational pressures attributable to psychological reactance.

On the one hand, when asked to suppress a thought, an individual’s conscious attempts not to think of the forbidden stimulus should promote success at the task. On the other hand, instructions that enjoin someone from thinking a particular thought are likely to create strong motivational pressures to do just that, i.e., conjure up the prohibited thought. Such pressures stem from the well-documented phenomenon of psychological reactance, in which an individual is motivated to restore freedom in the face of a barrier or prohibition, resulting in increased desire for a forbidden stimulus [ 19 – 23 ]. These reactance pressures are likely to compel one to think the very thought that one has been directed to avoid.

Theoretically, reactance can be aroused either by attempting to persuade an individual to engage in a certain action (e.g., “You must eat this cookie!”) or not to engage in one (“You must not eat this cookie!”). However, according to the principle of negative potency [ 24 , 25 ], the magnitude of reactance pressures is predicted to be especially strong when an individual is explicitly encouraged to refrain from (rather than engage in) a particular response [ 20 ]—precisely the conditions that have been found most likely to result in failure during thought suppression tasks [ 22 , 26 , 27 ]. We tested this prediction in the pilot study reported below.

Attentional myopia

Strong reactance pressures, such as those postulated to underlie many thought suppression attempts, may be especially difficult to resist when also performing a cognitive task. According to the attentional myopia model [ 28 , 29 ], in environments featuring competing behavioral pressures, such as the desire to eat high caloric food versus the desire to adhere to one’s (restrictive) diet, limitations placed on attention render it difficult to heed whichever pressure happens to be less salient. In situations involving strong eating cues, limits placed on attentional capacity, such as through the imposition of cognitive load, can make it difficult to attend to relatively weaker diet cues, resulting in increased consumption. By contrast, if diet cues are made disproportionately salient in the environment, then cognitive load should be associated with diminished eating, as the ability to pay attention to relatively less potent consumption cues is impaired. Both effects have been demonstrated in past studies [ 28 , 30 ]. Parallel attentional narrowing effects produced by alcohol intoxication, in which drunk individuals devote the bulk of attentional resources to salient internal or external cues, have now been shown in a number of investigations [ 31 – 33 ].

The effects of attentional myopia have also been demonstrated in domains other than those involving food consumption. For example, the imposition of cognitive load can result in individuals smoking more or less than they typically would, depending on the relative balance of factors promoting versus inhibiting smoking in the relevant environment [ 34 , 35 ]. Similarly, attentional narrowing brought about through arousal [ 36 ] can be associated with either increased or decreased aggression, again depending on whether cues promoting aggression or inhibiting aggression are more potent [ 37 ]. Attentional myopia effects have also been shown in investigations of prosocial behavior [ 38 ] and stereotyping [ 39 ].

The attentional myopia model holds that self-regulation failure is likely to result whenever pressures promoting disinhibition dominate limited attentional resources, to the neglect of those pressures prompting restraint, that is, inhibiting pressures that could otherwise be heeded in the absence of attentional limitation. Importantly, past research has found that such attention-consuming pressures can be either internal or external, as well as either cognitive or motivational in nature [ 40 ]. Indeed, even the most cognitive of cues (e.g., pallid statistics indicating the fat content), let alone more gustatory stimuli (e.g., the good taste of a milk shake), can ultimately be expected to play a motivational role (e.g., influencing consumption patterns) if sufficiently salient under conditions of limited attention [ 28 ].

Of equal importance, the cognitive load manipulations we have repeatedly employed in the past (and made use of in the studies reported here) are designed to be sufficiently taxing to limit attention but not so overwhelming so as to distract participants away from the primary task [ 41 ]. In other research, we have shown that significantly more demanding cognitive tasks can essentially prevent participants from attending to anything but the load task itself [ 42 ].

Pilot study

In an explicit test of the postulated dominance of “negative” over “positive” reactance, Ward, Chin, DeChiara, and Mann conducted a pilot study in which 181 undergraduate participants were provided with candy and, through random assignment, told either, “Do not eat the candy” (negative reactance condition); “Eat the candy” (positive reactance condition); or given no instruction regarding the candy (no reactance control condition). Responding to an item probing their sense of restricted freedom using a 9-point scale (1 = not restricted at all ; 9 = extremely restricted ), relative to responses from participants in the control condition ( M = 5.80, SD = 2.38; n = 61), participants in the negative reactance condition, who were restricted from eating the candy ( n = 59), reported a much greater (and statistically significant) restriction of their freedom (in this case, their freedom to eat the candy; M = 6.81, SD = 2.06), t (118) = 2.48, p = .014, d = 0.45, 95% CI = [.20, 1.82], than did those in the positive reaction condition ( n = 61), who were “forced” to consume the candy and asked to indicate how much their freedom to consume food other than the candy had been restricted ( M = 4.28, SD = 2.79 vs. M control = 4.39, SD control = 2.70), t (120) = 0.23, p > .81. In a second investigation, similar results were obtained using a stimulus more hedonically neutral than candy (and thus presumably less subject to any “self-imposed” dietary restriction, as might have been exhibited by some in the control condition). Using the same 9-point scale, compared to a control condition ( M = 2.24, SD = 187; n = 21), participants asked to make up an online password without using an asterisk as one of the characters ( n = 22) reported much greater (and, again, statistically significant) restriction of their freedom to use the asterisk ( M = 6.09, SD = 2.91), t (41) = 5.14, p < .001, d = 1.57, 95% CI = [2.34, 5.37], than did participants ( n = 21) instructed to use the asterisk and asked about restriction of their freedom to use characters other than the asterisk ( M = 2.52, SD = 2.38 vs. M control = 1.76, SD control = 1.26), t (40) = 1.30, p > .20.

Present studies

According to the attentional myopia model, to the extent that an instruction to suppress thoughts of a stimulus prompts strong reactance pressures to engage in the prohibited action, those pressures should be particularly difficult to resist when also under high cognitive load. In other words, given the hypothesized presence of strong reactance pressures in many thought suppression studies, participants asked to suppress a specific thought should typically fail to inhibit thoughts of the relevant target stimulus, particularly when they are also experiencing high cognitive load. By contrast, under low cognitive load, it should be possible to devote a significant degree of attention to pressures other than the salient reactance-induced forces that serve to promote thought suppression failure. Accordingly, when attention is not overly taxed, the desire to inhibit thoughts of the target stimulus should not be entirely dominated by reactance-based pressures, and greater success at suppression should be possible.

This analysis further suggests that, even when cognitive load is present, reducing the potency of reactance pressures should enhance suppression success. In our primary study reported below, we tested both of the aforementioned propositions, varying both cognitive load levels and the degree of reactance pressures surrounding a thought suppression task. In addition, in order to rule out competing explanations for our hypothesized results, we conducted several additional studies. Those supporting studies and their conclusions are detailed along with the results of the primary study below.

Reactance manipulation

Recall we have hypothesized that, when instructed to suppress a mental target, reactance pressures can come to dominate less potent attentional pressures, particularly when attention is limited by high cognitive load, leading to significant thought suppression failure. Specifically, when instructed to “try not to think of a white bear,” the pressure to think of a white bear should be perceived as stronger than the pressure not to. According to the relevant model, however, weakening those strong promoting reactance pressures should reduce monopolization of attentional resources, freeing cognitive capacity to devote to competing restraining pressures and, ultimately, resulting in greater suppression success, even under high cognitive load.

In prior related research [ 43 ], participants who were forbidden from consuming a certain food exhibited a relative increase in desire for the food, a result consistent with a reactance-driven motive to reassert freedom [ 21 ]. By contrast, participants who were instructed to avoid the food but assured by the experimenter that if they needed to eat it, they should “feel free” to do so, did not show the same reactance-based desire for the forbidden food. In the studies reported below, we adapted this manipulation for use in a thought suppression task. We manipulated reactance pressures by asking participants to try to suppress a thought under typical experimental conditions to produce suppression failure (pioneered by Wegner et al. [ 2 ] and extended in later investigations [ 7 ]) or to do so under conditions designed to highlight their freedom of choice to suppress. We predicted that participants in the latter condition would experience fewer reactance pressures and would therefore report reduced expenditure of relevant attentional resources.

In a preliminary study, we first investigated the proposed mechanism, whereby strong reactance pressures dominate attention more than weaker ones. Such an approach would enable subsequent observation of performance without demand characteristics prompted by the presences of a process measure [ 44 ].

Preliminary study: Attentional mechanism

Participants in this and all subsequent investigations were treated in accordance with the ethical principles spelled out by the American Psychological Association. The research was approved by the Swarthmore College Institutional Review Board, and written consent was obtained from participants prior to study participation. All participants in every study were conducted through all relevant procedures, and no participant’s data was omitted from the analyses or reported results.

A total of 171 undergraduate participants were randomly assigned to one of two conditions. In the standard suppression condition (control condition), they were instructed to “Please try not to think of a white bear.” In the experimental condition (free choice condition), they were instructed to “Please try not to think of a white bear, but of course if you need to, feel free” (in addition to the results of a prior relevant investigation [ 43 ], the reactance-lowering effect of this latter instruction was confirmed through ratings detailed below). After engaging in the suppression task for several minutes, all participants were then asked to complete the following dependent measure: “While you were doing the task, to what extent did thoughts of a white bear consume your attention?” (1 = Didn’t consume my attention at all ; 7 = Consumed my attention a great deal ).

Results and discussion

Before turning to the principal result, we report the findings of two supporting investigations in which we relied on judges to confirm the hypothesized strength of the proposed reactance pressures present in our manipulation. Brehm [ 19 ] has argued that although individuals may not typically be aware of the presence of reactance pressures (thus limiting the possibility of explicit measurement of the construct), such pressures vary directly with the magnitude of a prohibiting force. Accordingly, in the first supporting investigation, undergraduate judges ( n = 18) were provided with a written summary of the experimental procedure and asked to rate, in the context of the study, how much pressure they would feel not to think of a white bear under each of the two experimental conditions (with order of question counterbalanced across participants; 1 = no pressure at all ; 9 = extreme pressure ). Participants rated the control condition as producing much greater suppression pressure ( M = 6.28, SD = 1.74) than the free choice condition ( M = 4.61, SD = 2.12), paired t (17) = 4.30, p < .001, within-subjects d = 1.01, 95% CI = [.85, 2.49], suggesting, as predicted, stronger reactance pressures in the former than in the latter condition. This result was replicated in a between-subjects investigation, in which participants were either assigned to not think of a white bear ( n = 32) or instructed to not to think of a white bear but to feel free to do so if they needed to ( n = 34). Participants in this latter study were then provided with an explicit definition of reactance (“ reactance describes a state in which people feel their freedom to engage in a certain act is threatened”). Again, using a 9-point scale, those participants in the standard control condition reported significantly greater feelings of reactance ( M = 6.66, SD = 1.62) than did participants in the free choice condition ( M = 5.27, SD = 2.14), t (64) = 2.97, p = .004, d = .73, 95% CI = [.46, 2.33]. By contrast, the two groups did not differ significantly on measures of curiosity or puzzlement, both t s < 1, supporting the internal (and discriminant) validity of our reactance manipulation: Telling participants “Try not to think of a white bear, but of course if you need to, feel free” does indeed lower reactance pressures relative to the standard suppression instruction (i.e., “Try not to think of a white bear”).

Having confirmed the hypothesized difference in reactance pressures, turning to the main result, participants assigned to the control condition in the preliminary study ( n = 89), who had been asked simply to suppress thoughts of a white bear, reported that thoughts of the white bear consumed more of their attention ( M = 5.46, SD = 2.01) than did those participants assigned to the free choice condition ( M = 4.80, SD = 2.06, n = 82), t (169) = 2.19, p = .037, d = .32, 95% confidence interval (CI) = [.04, 1.27].

Consistent with the predictions of the attentional myopia model, a manipulation designed to weaken putative reactance pressures by highlighting participants’ freedom of choice resulted in less attention devoted to the forbidden thought. According to the model, this freeing of attentional resources away from the suppression target should render the suppression processes easier, resulting in greater success at avoiding the forbidden thought. In other words, consistent with theorizing by Steele and Josephs [ 45 ], by lowering the putative burden placed on attention by strong reactance pressures, participants should be able to allocate more attention toward engaging in successful distraction away from the suppression target, even when under conditions of attentional limitation.

In our primary study, we therefore tested the prediction that weakening reactance pressures would indeed result in greater suppression success, even under conditions of cognitive load. Importantly, in the absence of high cognitive load, little difference in suppression success was expected, as even strong reactance pressures can be countered by opposing suppression efforts if cognitive resources are not overtaxed. This prediction, with only small observed differences between suppression instruction conditions under low load but large differences expected under high load, is bolstered by the fact that that precise pattern has been observed in prior studies exploring behaviors other than thought suppression [ 28 , 32 ].

In accompanying investigations, we also provided data that served to rule out alternative accounts for the relevant phenomenon.

Primary study

In this study, we once again manipulated reactance pressures by asking participants to try to suppress a thought under typical experimental conditions or to do so under conditions designed to highlight their freedom of choice to do so. We predicted that participants in the latter condition would experience reduced reactance pressures and, consequently, enhanced suppression success, even when under the attentional limiting effects of cognitive load.

A total of 108 undergraduates participated in exchange for introductory psychology course credit. This sample size was larger by almost 30% than samples employed in seven of eight past relevant studies investigating thought suppression [ 2 , 9 , 12 , 17 ] and simply made use of every participant available in the relevant subject pool, without any exclusions or premature termination of the study.

All participants were asked to complete a standard thought suppression task that has been used repeatedly by other researchers in published studies [ 46 – 48 ]. Each participant received a sheet of paper with the heading “My Thoughts” and a column on the right side with a sample check mark at the top. Participants were told that they would be listing their thoughts for five minutes, and in the control condition they were further instructed to “try not to think of a white bear.” By contrast, in the free choice condition, participants were told, “Try not to think of a white bear, but of course if you need to, feel free.” All participants were asked to put a check mark in the column on the right side of the sheet each time they thought of a white bear.

Participants were also asked to memorize either a one-digit number (low cognitive-load condition) or a nine-digit number (high cognitive-load condition). The experimenter then reminded participants one final time not to think of the relevant stimulus, instructed them to begin listing their thoughts without writing down the number they were to memorize, and left the room for five minutes, returning to collect the thought-listing sheet.

A 2 (control vs. free choice) x 2 (low vs. high cognitive load) analysis of variance (ANOVA) revealed significant main effects of both task instruction, F (1, 104) = 7.87, p = .006, and cognitive load, (also) F (1, 104) = 7.87, p = .006, along with the predicted interaction between the two factors, F (1, 104) = 4.34, p = .040, η p 2 = .04 ( Fig 1 ). Averaging across cognitive load conditions, participants asked to suppress white bear thoughts in the high reactance (standard control: “Try not to think of a white bear”) conditions indicated greater suppression failures ( M = 4.62, SD = 3.47) than did those asked to suppress thoughts under conditions designed to reduce reactance pressures (“Try not to think of a white bear, but if you need to, feel free”; M = 2.98, SD = 2.74), t (106) = 2.71, p = .008, d = .52, 95% CI = [.44, 2.83]. Moreover, averaging across reactance conditions, those asked to perform suppression under conditions of low cognitive load were more successful ( M = 2.98, SD = 2.56) than those asked to perform under conditions of high cognitive load ( M = 4.62, SD = 3.60), (also) t (106) = 2.71, p = .008, d = .53, 95% CI = [.44, 2.83]. Furthermore, as revealed by the significant interaction, under conditions of low load, participants asked to suppress thoughts of a white bear under standard conditions did not perform significantly worse ( M = 3.19, SD = 2.65) than did those asked to suppress thoughts under free choice conditions ( M = 2.77, SD = 2.50), t (51) = 0.59, p > .55, d = .16, 95% CI = [-1.01, 1.84]. By contrast, under conditions of high load, those asked to suppress white bear thoughts in the control condition failed at a significantly higher rate ( M = 6.00, SD = 3.65) than did those in the free choice condition ( M = 3.19, SD = 2.99), t (53) = 3.12, p = .003, d = .84, 95% CI = [1.01, 4.62]. Put another way, consistent with our hypothesis, although participants’ ability to suppress thoughts of a white bear under standard conditions was hampered by high cognitive load, t (53) = 3.26, p = .002, d = .88, 95% CI = [1.09, 4.55] (thus replicating the pattern of results reported by Wegner [ 7 ]), under conditions designed to lower reactance pressures, the imposition of high cognitive load did not significantly hinder participants’ ability to suppress thoughts, t (51) = 0.55, p > .58, d = .15, 95 CI = [-1.94, 1.11].

Error bars indicate standard errors.

An analysis of high cognitive-load condition participants’ success at recalling the 9-digit number revealed no difference between the control and free choice conditions, t < 1. Moreover, an analysis including a factor accounting for whether or not participants correctly recalled the relevant number revealed no alteration of the significance of the findings (indeed, this analysis slightly strengthened the statistical significance of the primary finding, F (1, 102) = 5.45, p = .022). Similarly, analyses that relied on “simple effects” derived from the overall mean square error of the relevant ANOVA, rather than independent sample t -tests, mirrored the significance of the primary effects we reported: In the control condition, participants under high cognitive load evidenced much greater suppression failure than did those under low load, F (1, 104) = 12.17, p = .001, whereas in the free choice condition, the two cognitive load conditions did not differ, F (1, 104) = 0.26, p > .61.

In sum, by reducing reactance pressures and essentially giving participants permission to fail at the high-load suppression task, we heightened their success, bringing their performance in line with those not under load.

Ruling out alternatives: Effort ratings

The possibility that the reactance-lowering instructions might have completely forestalled participants’ efforts at suppression also warranted investigation, as withholding all effort at mental control actually may prevent suppression failure [ 16 ]. To address this potential confound, we ran an additional sample of 40 undergraduates through the basic thought suppression task. After the five-minute suppression period had ended, participants randomly assigned to the standard suppression condition ( n = 20) and the free choice condition ( n = 20) were asked to indicate, by means of a 9-point scale, how hard they had tried not to think of a white bear (1 = Didn’t try at all ; 9 = Tried extremely hard ). The results revealed little difference in the mean degree of effort expended by participants in the standard ( M = 5.20, SD = 2.02) vs. free choice ( M = 5.10, SD = 2.13) condition, t (38) = 0.15, p > .87, suggesting that the manipulation of reactance-relevant instructions did not prevent participants from trying to suppress. A second study involving a much larger sample of participants ( n = 339) did reveal a significant difference in effort expended by participants in the standard ( M = 5.23, SD = 2.11) vs. free choice ( M = 4.53, SD = 2.23) condition, t (337) = 2.97, p = .003, d = .32, 95% CI = [.24, 1.16]. However, even in this investigation, participants in the free choice condition reported substantial effort expended, rather than a withholding of all effort. Moreover, given the hypothesized greater ease of suppression in the free choice condition, it is not surprising that that condition demanded less effort from participants. The important point is that the results suggest that both the standard and free choice conditions required effort and thus did not free participants from the responsibility of engaging in suppression.

Ruling out alternatives: Inference ratings

One additional alternative explanation merited detailed consideration in a supporting investigation. Förster and Liberman [ 14 ] have speculated that participants might infer from the experimenter’s suppression instructions that they are going to encounter difficulty with the task, perhaps motivating them to think the forbidden thought. As they argue, “[A] participant in a suppression experiment might think, ‘Why would the experimenter ask me not to think of white bears unless he or she thought that I was about to do that? Probably, then, in this experiment I will feel compelled to think of white bears’” (p. 389). To the extent that participants were especially likely to harbor such a conviction in the control condition of our study (as opposed to the free choice condition), this belief would potentially offer an alternative explanation for our results.

Note that this alternative (if valid) and our account would both seem to suggest greater compulsion to use the suppressed construct in the control (“try not to think of a white bear”) rather than the free choice condition (“try not to think of a white bear, but of course if you need to, feel free”). However, only Förster and Liberman’s account suggests that the reason for this difference in putative suppression failure rates lies in a difference in beliefs imputed to the experimenter across the two conditions. Accordingly, we exposed an additional 78 undergraduate participant judges to one of the two suppression instructions and then asked them, “Based solely on those instructions, to what extent did the experimenter think the participant would in fact be motivated to think of a white bear?” (1 = not at all ; 9 = a great deal ). Although there was no significant difference between the two conditions, t (76) = 1.64, p > .10, participants who read the free choice condition instructions reported that they believed the experimenter was more likely to think the participants would be motivated to think of a white bear ( n = 39, M = 7.03, SD = 1.95) than did participants exposed to the standard suppression instructions ( n = 39; M = 6.23, SD = 2.31). As Förster and Liberman’s [ 14 ] potential alternative explanation would appear to require that participants in the free choice condition should have thought that the experimenter was less —not more—likely to think that they would be motivated to think of a white bear, such a finding suggests that, given the results we obtained (i.e., greater suppression failure in the control condition than in the free choice condition), they could not be accounted for by this alternative explanation.

In sum, our supporting investigations indicated that the results we obtained in the primary study could be attributed to differences in reactance pressures, whose varying strength was confirmed by raters, and not to either a withholding of effort or inferences about the experimenter’s instructions in the reactance-lowering conditions.

General discussion

Consistent with a significant number of studies conducted by Wegner and colleagues in an investigation of what he termed “ironic process theory” [ 7 ], using standard suppression instructions, we replicated the failure to suppress a target thought under conditions of high cognitive load. Also consistent with Wegner’s theorizing, participants who were not under such load were much more successful at the suppression task. They were evidently relatively capable of countering potent pressures to think of the relevant forbidden stimulus, and thus they ended up producing fewer suppression failures. As Wegner had shown, the introduction of a 9-digit memorization task into the standard suppression procedure did indeed result in a heightened level of suppression failure, in which promoting pressures evidently dominated inhibiting pressures to a degree not observed in the absence of such cognitive load.

However, in novel findings not previously reported and not easily assimilated by existing ironic process accounts, a manipulation intended to reduce a potent motivational force, i.e., reactance pressures, effectively eliminated the documented impairment produced by high cognitive load on participants’ suppression abilities. According to the attentional myopia model, and bolstered by the findings of the preliminary study, a manipulation that emphasized participants’ free choice to suppress lowered reactance pressures and freed up cognitive resources. Those resources could then evidently be devoted to successful suppression, even under conditions of limited attention.

Of course, there are limitations associated with our reported results. In particular, our studies made use of undergraduate psychology students as participants, subject to the familiar criticism of relying largely on “WEIRD” samples [ 49 ], and no attempt was made to investigate the generalizability of our findings beyond this respondent pool. We also did not ask participants to report their gender or ethnicity, and therefore it is not possible to test for moderation by these individual difference variables, a regrettable oversight that is important for us to correct in future work [ 50 ]. In addition, we did not conduct a priori power analyses, knowing that we would instead use every participant available to us in our college participant pool and that our sample sizes would at least exceed those in past similar research. However, some of the sample sizes and effects reported here were not especially large.

Other suppression domains

Those potential limitations notwithstanding, our results suggest that certain stimuli should be relatively straightforward to suppress, even under conditions of cognitive load, if doing so does not arouse strong reactance pressures. One such category of “low reactance” responses includes behaviors that, though involving suppression, are freely chosen from the outset because they are consistent with the individual’s current goals, as opposed to being imposed by an experimenter who suddenly expects participants to suppress thoughts of a “white bear” (a highly unusual request in the relevant context). In short, in situations in which an instruction to engage in suppression is consistent with the individual’s own goals (i.e., “ego-syntonic” in terms expressed by Freud [ 51 ]), strong reactance pressures and accompanying suppression failure are not predicted to occur.

Past considerations of reactance and thought suppression

In past work, a number of researchers have entertained—and then dismissed—reactance as a mechanism underlying thought suppression failure [ 14 ]. For example, Wegner et al. raised psychological reactance as an alternative explanation for their thought suppression “rebound” findings [ 2 ]. However, they rejected such a proposition without first testing it, asking, Why should instructing participants not to think of a white bear produce a greater level of task failure than instructing participants to think of a white bear? (a difference the authors had documented). As they stated, “The difficulty with this [reactance] interpretation comes when we try to understand why a negative injunction should create more reactance than a positive one” (p. 8). Wegner [ 7 ] also argued that reactance can be distinguished from his ironic process theory account of suppression failure because the former state “can come and go without the occurrence of intentional mental control” (p. 39). We do not dispute that explanations invoking reactance can apply to situations other than those involving thought suppression [ 23 ]).

The aforementioned negative potency findings [ 24 ] and results of our pilot investigations (see above) notwithstanding, there may be a simple reason why a negative injunction regarding a forbidden thought produces more reactance than a positive directive to think a particular thought. Wegner himself offered such a reason, invoking an elegant distinction between feature negative and feature positive searches [ 52 ]. According to Wegner, when an individual is instructed not to think a certain thought (e.g., “try not to think of a white bear”), the monitoring process—that essentially automatic cognitive process that searches for instances of failure at the task—is given a relatively simple task: search for instances in which the thought arises (e.g., notice every instance in which a white bear thought emerges into consciousness)—a task known as a feature positive search [ 7 ]. By contrast, when an individual is instructed to concentrate on a particular thought (e.g., “try to think of a white bear”), the monitoring process is presented with a more difficult challenge in its appointed task to search for failures to complete the task. It must search for instances in which the thought does not arise (e.g., notice every thought that does not in any way constitute a white bear). This type of search, known as a feature negative search, is more difficult because the monitoring process is not presented with as clear a target to indicate failure has occurred (i.e., what precisely constitutes a “not white bear” thought?).

We believe that the distinction between feature positive and feature negative searches can also explain why negative reactance (i.e., the motivational pressure following an instruction not to engage in a certain behavior) is more powerful than positive reactance (i.e., the motivational pressure following an instruction to engage in a certain behavior). To the extent that reactance motivates an individual to engage in a response opposing the pertinent command, it is not difficult to understand why instructing someone not to think of a white bear is more reactance-arousing that instructing someone to think of a white bear. In the former case, the reactance-prompted opposing response is clear (“think of a white bear”); in the latter case, the response is less clear (“think of something that is not in any way a white bear”). As a result, negative reactance is predicted to create more of a preoccupation with an opposing state than is positive reactance. In short, the same feature positive vs. feature negative search processes that Wegner introduced to explain the greater failure rate of thought suppression over concentration can also explain why negative reactance is stronger than positive reactance.

Dispositional reactance

Although some theoretical accounts have suggested—and then summarily rejected without explicit experimental manipulation—a reactance explanation for thought suppression failure, past research has attempted to explore the role of dispositional reactance in the relevant phenomenon. Kelly and Nauta, for example, measured participants’ personal tendencies to experience reactance and found that those higher in the relevant trait were more likely to experience intrusions of a thought they had been instructed to suppress [ 22 ]. However, the reported results failed to reach conventional levels of statistical significance. Indeed, the basic thought suppression vs. thought expression instruction employed in the study failed to produce a difference in intrusions that was statistically significant at conventional levels.

One possibility for these failures may involve the fact that participants in the study were not asked to suppress an unusual thought but, rather, were instructed to suppress their “most frequently occurring intrusive thought.” As was found by Kelly and Kahn [ 53 ], asking participants not to think about a thought that they have previously encountered many times (one that they may be well practiced at avoiding) may result in greater task success than when an individual is confronted with a novel target for suppression.

Given these past studies, it is perhaps surprising that no previous attempt has been made to explicitly manipulate, rather than measure, reactance and observe the consequences for thought suppression, as was done here. The results of this investigation suggest for the very first time that direct alteration of reactance pressures can impact thought suppression success, just as a previous study found that food desires could be influenced through a similar reactance manipulation [ 43 ].

Implications for mental control

Inherent in any situation requiring the exercise of self-control is conflict [ 54 ]. In the studies reported here, participants faced a conflict between trying to suppress a target thought while contending with potent forces prompting them to think the forbidden thought. These findings suggest clinical implications. Wegner [ 16 ] has argued that failures in mental control may underlie certain forms of psychopathology, such as anxiety disorders and depression [ 55 ]. These failures can be exacerbated by cognitive demands, leading to rumination and intensification of negative states [ 18 ]. Our results suggest that to the extent that individuals can give themselves permission to think forbidden thoughts, then even when cognitive load is present, it may be possible to suppress such thoughts to a degree that minimizes ensuing pathology [ 16 , 56 , 57 ].

In some ways, the reactance-lowering approach described here also mirrors similar recent efforts in clinical domains that encourage individuals to free themselves from crippling guilt or anxiety and simply accept their current state without judgment [ 58 ]. Such mindfulness-based approaches have attracted the attention of many clinical researchers in recent years. In the words of one review of this approach [ 59 ], “The goal is to end the struggle with unwanted thoughts and feelings without attempting to change or eliminate them” (p. 5). One intriguing outcome of the approach described in the studies reported here is that, in essentially being granted “permission” to think a forbidden thought even while under cognitive load, that thought was ultimately more effectively eliminated than when given a more explicit prohibition against the relevant cognition.

Suppression failure under cognitive load presented itself as an ideal target for investigation and explanation using the attentional myopia model. We do not mean to imply, however, that alternative explanations for the same phenomenon enjoy no validity. Indeed, we agree with Wegner and Schneider that thought suppression failure under cognitive load may be amenable to several theoretical accounts [ 60 ], all of which are consistent with the available data (including more recent neurological findings [ 61 ]). Although the analysis reported here suggests a potential alternative explanation for a host of relevant findings, we see its real value in providing a distinct strategy for enhancing success at thought suppression under load. Of course, the best approach to suppression may be not to attempt it at all [ 16 , 62 ], but barring that, reducing reactance may offer a path to tamer thoughts, whether they be about white bears or anything else.

Funding Statement

This work was supported by funding from the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute to T.M. and A.W. [Grant # HL88887]. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.

Data Availability

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Polar Bear Research

• Publications

Polar bears ( Ursus maritimus ) are one of 4 marine mammal species managed by the U.S. Department of Interior. The USGS Alaska Science Center leads long–term research on polar bears to inform local, state, national and international policy makers regarding conservation of the species and its habitat. Our studies, ongoing since 1985, are focused on population dynamics, health and energetics, distribution and movements, maternal denning, and methods development. The majority of our research focuses on the two polar bear subpopulation’s whose range includes Alaska: the Southern Beaufort Sea subpopulation that ranges between the North Slope of Alaska and western Canada and the Chukchi Sea or Alaska-Chukotka subpopulation that ranges between the northwest coast of Alaska and eastern Russia. The overarching goal of our research is to assess current and projected future responses of polar bears to a rapidly changing Arctic environment.

Return to Ecosystems  >> Marine Ecosystems

Video: Polar Bear Collar Cam

Video: about the polar bear research program, video: melting arctic sea ice threatens polar bears, polar bear reseach projects.

Information on the status and trends of polar bear populations are needed to inform management of polar bears under US laws and international agreements. 

Population Dynamics

Health and energetics, distribution and movements, maternal denning.

Below are other science projects associated with this project.

Polar Bear Maternal Denning

Polar Bear Media/Contacts

Polar Bear Population Dynamics

Distribution and Movements of Polar Bears

Health and Energetics of Polar Bears

Q&a: recent research on southern beaufort sea polar bears.

Q&A: Polar Bears and Zoos

Below are data or web applications associated with this project.

Pathogen Exposure Data for Chukchi Sea Polar Bears 1988-1994 and 2008-2017

Southern beaufort sea polar bear fatty acid data, spring samples 2004-2016, estimated post-emergence period for denning polar bears of the chukchi and beaufort seas, diet composition of southern beaufort sea polar bears sampled in spring from 2004 to 2016 estimated with quantitative fatty acid signature analysis, metabolic rate, body composition, and blood biochemistry data from polar bears (ursus maritimus) on land, western hudson bay, canada, 2019-2022, diet estimates of southern beaufort sea polar bears, 2004-2016, mercury concentrations, diet, and gut microbiota diversity of southern beaufort sea polar bears, 2008-2019, southern beaufort sea polar bear blood based analyte data, 1983-2018, southern beaufort sea polar bear diet and gut microbiota data, 2015-2019, polar bear continuous time-correlated random walk (ctcrw) location data derived from satellite location data, chukchi and beaufort seas, july-november 1985-2017, data used to assess the acute physiological response of polar bears to helicopter capture, polar bear fall coastal survey data from the southern beaufort sea of alaska, 2010-2013.

Below are multimedia associated with this project.

POV Polar Bear Collar Cam B-roll 2019, 2021, and 2022

This is B-roll video of POV Polar Bear Collar Cam B-roll 2019, 2021, and 2022. 

USGS Alaska Science Center Polar Bear Research Program

The USGS Alaska Science Center leads long–term research on polar bears to inform local, state, national and international policy makers regarding conservation of the species and its habitat.

Polar bear with a GPS-enabled video camera collar

An adult male polar bear with a GPS-enabled video camera collar on land in Wapusk National Park, Canada as part of a study measuring the energy expenditure, behavior, movement, and body composition changes of polar bears on land.

Adult male polar bear interacting with two other bears in the ocean

Point-of-view image of an adult male polar bear interacting with two other bears while in the ocean near Churchill, Manitoba, Canada. The image was recorded from a GPS-enabled video camera collar as part of a study measuring the energy expenditure, behavior, movement, and body composition changes of polar bears on land. 

Adult male polar bear interacting with another bear in the ocean

Point-of-view image of an adult male polar bear interacting with another bear while in the ocean near Churchill, Manitoba, Canada. The image was recorded from a GPS-enabled video camera collar as part of a study measuring the energy expenditure, behavior, movement, and body composition changes of polar bears on land.

Adult male polar bear walking along the coast

Point-of-view image of an adult male polar bear walking along the coast in Wapusk National Park, Canada. The image was recorded from a GPS-enabled video camera collar as part of a study measuring the energy expenditure, behavior, movement, and body composition changes of polar bears on land.

Adult male polar bear interacting with two other bears while on land

Point-of-view image of an adult male polar bear interacting with two other bears while on land near Churchill, Manitoba, Canada. The image was recorded from a GPS-enabled video camera collar as part of a study measuring the energy expenditure, behavior, movement, and body composition changes of polar bears on land. 

Role of Diet and Food Intake Affecting Polar Bear Population Dynamics in Southern Beaufort Sea

This is a graphical abstract for a publication by the USGS and collaborators that examines the role of diet and food intake affecting polar bear population dynamics. Polar bears consume diets consisting of high proportions of marine mammal blubber that they access from the sea ice.

2022 Polar Bear Research Masterplan

Scientists continue to study how a warming Arctic will affect polar bear populations. The new 2022 Polar Bear Research Council Masterplan identifies how polar bears in zoos can help fill knowledge gaps that benefit wild populations.

Polar Bears Film Their Own Sea Ice World

This video showcases the latest polar bear point-of-view footage to date along with an interview of the research scientist who is responsible for the project. Released in conjunction with a new scientific study led by the USGS.   

Polar Bear Collar Cam B-Roll 2014, 2015, 2016

Exciting polar bear cam b-roll footage from the bear’s perspective from 2014, 2015, and 2016. The USGS Alaska Science Center Polar Bear Research Project conducts long-term research on polar bears to inform, local, state, national and international policy makers regarding conservation and management of the species and its habitat.

Polar bear walks across flooded barrier island during Arctic storm

Adult polar bear walking across a recently overwashed barrier island during a large Arctic storm in September 2016. The barrier island is offshore of Barter Island on Alaska’s north coast.

Polar Bear - POV Cams (Spring 2016)

This short clip is representative of a large amount of video footage of an adult female polar bear, equipped with a point of view camera, that is used by scientists to study polar bear behavior and feeding rates.

Karyn Rode checking vitals of polar bear on the Chukchi Sea

Karyn Rode taking vitals on a polar bear in the Chukchi Sea April 2016. On sea ice off the northwest coast of Alaska in the Chukchi Sea.

Adult male polar bear walking

Photo of adult male polar bear walking towards seal (upper right) Chukchi Sea, Alaska

Swimming Polar Bear

Data collected from long distance swims by Polar bears suggest that they do not stop to rest during their journey.

Two Swimming Polar Bears

An Adult Polar Bear and Her Two Cubs

An adult female polar bear and her two cubs travel across the sea ice of the Arctic Ocean north of the Alaska coast.

Polar bear wearing a GPS satellite video-camera collar

An adult female polar bear on the sea ice wearing a GPS satellite video-camera collar. GPS video-camera collars were applied to solitary adult female polar bears for 8 - 12 days in April, 2014-2016. These collars enabled researchers to understand the movements, behaviors, and foraging success of polar bears on the sea ice.

San Diego Zoo Polar Bear

Tatqiq, an adult female polar bear at the San Diego Zoo, wearing an accelerometer collar being used to develop a method to remotely identify wild polar bear behaviors.

Below are publications associated with this project.

Potential impacts of an autumn oil spill on polar bears summering on land in northern Alaska

The post-emergence period for denning polar bears: phenology and influence on cub survival, ursids evolved dietary diversity without major alterations in metabolic rates, polar bear energetic and behavioral strategies on land with implications for surviving the ice-free period.

Declining Arctic sea ice is increasing polar bear land use. Polar bears on land are thought to minimize activity to conserve energy. Here, we measure the daily energy expenditure (DEE), diet, behavior, movement, and body composition changes of 20 different polar bears on land over 19–23 days from August to September (2019–2022) in Manitoba, Canada. Polar bears on land exhibited a 5.2-fold range in

Long-term storage at -20°C compromises fatty acid composition of polar bear adipose biopsies

Identifying indicators of polar bear population status, sea-ice conditions predict polar bear land use around military installations in alaska, incremental evolution of modeling a prognosis for polar bears in a rapidly changing arctic, forecasts of polar bear (ursus maritimus) land use in the southern beaufort and chukchi seas, 2040–65, a body composition model with multiple storage compartments for polar bears (ursus maritimus), high winds and melting sea ice trigger landward movement in a polar bear population of concern, fecal dna metabarcoding shows credible short-term prey detections and explains variation in the gut microbiome of two polar bear subpopulations.

Below are news stories associated with this project.

• DOI: 10.1080/00223890902935738
• Corpus ID: 15551901

Anatomy of the White Bear Suppression Inventory (WBSI): A Review of Previous Findings and a New Approach

• R. E. Schmidt , P. Gay , +5 authors M. Van der Linden
• Published in Journal of Personality… 8 June 2009

69 Citations

Individual differences in preference for thought suppression: components and correlates of the white bear suppression inventory.

• Highly Influenced

Revisiting the Factor Structure of the White Bear Suppression Inventory in Adolescents: An Exploratory Structural Equation Modeling Approach

Validation of the white bear suppression inventory for the mexican population, psychometric qualities of the white bear suppression inventory in a dutch sample of children and adolescents, psychometric qualities of the thought suppression inventory-revised in different age groups, the effortful control scale for adults: psychometric properties of the catalan version and its relationship to cognitive emotion regulation, the relevance of mindfulness and thought suppression to scrupulosity, impulsivity and intrusive thoughts: related manifestations of self-control difficulties, profiles of everyday thought suppression, fifteen years controlling unwanted thoughts: a systematic review of the thought control ability questionnaire (tcaq), 41 references, the white bear suppression inventory: revisiting its factor structure.

• Highly Influential
• 10 Excerpts

Using item response theory to examine the White Bear Suppression Inventory

Confirmatory factor analysis of the white bear suppression inventory and the thought control questionnaire: a comparison of alternative models., individual differences in thought suppression. the white bear suppression inventory: factor structure, reliability, validity and correlates., the white bear suppression inventory (wbsi) focuses on failing suppression attempts.

• 14 Excerpts

Differentiating unwanted intrusive thoughts from thought suppression: what does the White Bear Suppression Inventory measure?

Chronic thought suppression..

• 11 Excerpts

Chronic thought suppression and obsessionality: the relationships between the White Bear Suppression Inventory and two inventories of obsessive-compulsive symptoms

Thought suppression, dissociation and psychopathology, the thought control questionnaire: a measure of individual differences in the control of unwanted thoughts., related papers.

Showing 1 through 3 of 0 Related Papers

A Smithsonian magazine special report

This Rare, White Bear May Be the Key to Saving a Canadian Rainforest

The white Kermode bear of British Columbia is galvanizing First Nations people fighting to protect their homeland

By Alex Shoumatoff

Photographs by Melissa Groo

Very quietly we paddle to shore in a raft from the research vessel, which has stopped at the mouth of a small river cascading into the Pacific, one of more than a hundred salmon-bearing rivers in the 1,500-square-mile territory of the Kitasoo/Xai’xais people. We’re halfway up the coast of British Columbia, in the heart of the Great Bear Rainforest, in one of the largest unspoiled temperate rainforests on earth. We climb out and sit on boulders in the intertidal zone, in front of a meadow. Behind it is primeval forest, a solid wall of trees—western red cedar, Sitka spruce, alder, hemlock, Douglas fir.

A crow let out two clarion caws as we came in, and now every animal within earshot knows of our arrival. The humans are back. Four of us have mounted serious lenses on tripods, and we are all waiting motionlessly, respectfully. Big gobs of meringuelike foam drift down the final run of the river into the seething surf. “Organic matter,” whispers our guide, Philip Charles, a 26-year-old Brit who has a bachelor’s degree in animal conservation science and has been made an honorary Kita­soo for all the work he has done to help these First Nations people reassert sovereignty over their homeland, and to get ecotourism going.

The Kitasoo merged with the Xai’xais during the second half of the 1800s and founded the community of Klemtu, on Swindle Island, on the Inside Passage from Vancouver to Alaska. The main trade item along the coast was eulachon, an oily smelt whose flesh was a food staple and whose oil was used as a medicine and for illumination. By the end of the 20th century, though, there weren’t enough eulachon to sustain a market. Today, many of the more than 300 Kitasoo/Xai’xais living here rely on ecotourism.

After 20 minutes, Charles points to a luminous white bear, maybe 300 pounds, which has come out of the dark forest on the other side of the river, some 200 feet upstream. She slips gently down into a pool fed by water gushing over a ledge. Within a few minutes, she bats a salmon into her mouth and ambles with it back into the forest.

The white bear is known to the Kita­soo as the Moksgm’ol , the spirit, or ghost, bear. The Kitasoo have been living on these coastal islands and fjord-diced tongues of mainland for thousands of years. They revere every living thing, but the Moksgm’ol is especially sacred. It is one of the rarest bears on earth. There are as few as 100, according to some estimates. Scientifically, the white ones, along with their closest black relatives, belong to a subspecies of black bear: the Kermode bear, Ursus americanus kermodei , named in 1905 for Francis Kermode, who helped zoologists find the bears and later became the director of the Royal British Columbia Museum in Victoria. Geneticists have since learned that the coloration results from a mutation in a gene involved in the production of melanin. (It’s not one of the four genes responsible for albinism.) The trait is recessive: Both parents must carry a copy of the mutated gene for their offspring to be white. In the Great Bear Rainforest, some 500 to 1,200 black bears might be carriers.

But “no one really knows how many bears there are in the Great Bear Rainforest,” cautions Chris Darimont, the Hakai-Raincoast professor of geography at the University of Victoria, who is partnering with the Kitasoo/Xai’xais and other First Nations, including the Heiltsuk, down the coast, in the first on-the-ground research incorporating indigenous knowledge and customs in the study of the rainforest’s bears.

The largest concentration of white bears, an estimated 7 out of a population of 35, inhabits 80-square-mile Gribbell Island, in the territory of the Gitga’at, the next nation up the coast. The greatest number, maybe 50 or 60, is on Princess Royal Island, adjacent to Gribbell and ten times larger. And there are frequent sightings around Terrace, on the mainland to the north. In 2014, guides at the Spirit Bear Lodge, in Klemtu, saw eight, the most since the lodge had opened six years earlier.

This bear at the river, a female that has a cub, was first spotted two and a half weeks ago. There are no other bears here, no competition, no males to kill her cub—which they sometimes do to get the female back into estrus. Charles says he has returned with guests from the lodge eight times, and only once did mother and cub not appear. Yesterday she left the cub alone with Charles and his party for ten minutes, as if she wanted the cub to learn that people are not so bad after all. They have obviously never encountered a hunter, the greatest immediate threat to bears (black and grizzlies) in the Great Bear Rainforest, where more than two dozen a year are killed by hunters authorized by British Columbia’s Ministry of Forests, Lands and Natural Resource Operations. It is illegal to hunt a white bear under any circumstance, but a hunter with a permit could take a black bear carrying the gene.

Charles says the cub is a male in its first year of life. It’s October now. Next spring, when the bears leave their den, his mother will boot him out into the world and he’ll be on his own.

After a minute or so mom re-emerges from the woods without the salmon, slips back into the pool and catches another one. She sits on some rocks and tears its flesh apart and devours it.

The diet of all the bears here, and of the local wolves, is primarily salmon, berries and seaweed. The native people eat these same foods, along with deer and halibut, mussels and sea urchin. Salmon, though, is the sine qua non of this ecosystem. Bears carry the salmon into the forest, where the rotting carcasses, rich in nitrogen, fertilize the soil. The nitrogen permeates the trees and the flowering plants; even the snails and slugs get it. The sea feeds the forest, and the bears are the bearers of these nutritious infusions.

Each of the spawning rivers in the Kitasoo/Xai’xais territory has its own salmon population, born in the river and guided by the river’s unique olfactory signature; the fish return to spawn after years of wandering in the North Pacific. Each river is on its own schedule, with four of the seven Pacific species—sockeye, coho, pink and chum—running up the same river at different times. Climate change, though, is threatening these runs by warming up the waters, and thus threatening the bears that fatten up on the salmon to get through the winter. Overfishing is also a problem here.

The pink salmon that we watch the mother bear devour are already dead. Having spawned and expired upstream, they have floated down. “Yesterday she caught two live ones,” Charles tells us. “Some bears fish fast; they catch 20 salmon in 20 minutes and devour them immediately. Others are really picky and will only eat the brain and eggs. There is a huge range in the personalities of individual bears, just like us.”

Her cub comes out of the woods and joins in the feast. He has a reddish collar and his white coat is shaded brownish here and there, unlike his mother’s. We debate in whispers whether this is juvenile coloration and the cub will get whiter with age, whether his coat is an imperfect expression of the mutation, or whether it’s just dirty.

The mutation probably rose to prominence during the last ice age, hypothesizes Kermit Ritland, a population geneticist at the University of British Columbia who led the study that identified it. Glaciers then covered most of the Pacific Northwest. Perhaps a black bear population was cut off on a strip along the coast, and inbreeding increased the mutation’s frequency and its odds of meeting up with itself. Later, as the glaciers melted and the sea rose, some of the bears might have been stranded on these islands while others traveled back to the mainland.

Researchers have recently discovered that white bears attempting to capture salmon are 30 percent more successful than black bears during the daytime, presumably because, from the perspective of fish in the river, the white bears are less visible against the sky, like the white-bellied Bonaparte’s gulls and glaucous-winged gulls that are plentiful in the area. Part of this study involved researchers dressing up in white or black coveralls and entering the river to see which outfit spooked the salmon less.

So the white forms seem to have a slight edge in the quest for protein, but not enough for their mutated gene to have more than a 10 to 30 percent frequency. Why the white coloration persists in the population remains something of a puzzle, and scientists don’t yet know whether it comes with any other ecological consequences.

The mom and cub cross the river, which is only 30 feet wide, and go down into another pool behind some rocks, which the mother climbs up and peers over, now only 50 feet away. With only her head visible, she studies us intently, drinks us in and sniffs us out with her ash-colored nose, the way elephants do with their trunks. A bear’s sense of smell is ten times stronger than a dog’s, which is 1,000 times stronger than a human’s, and it is the main sense used during the day, a Kita­soo guide told me.

The mom decides not to come any closer, and she and the cub slip into the woods. I wonder what she makes of the brace of cameras clicking away, of all the attention she is getting, like a celebrity at a photo op. She is a celebrity, an official animal of British Columbia, and the panda of Canada. That’s what the spirit bear has been called by the environmental groups that enlisted it in the battle to protect the Great Bear Rainforest, which began in the 1990s and is still going on. At this point, about a third of the Great Bear Rainforest is fully protected, and not all of the First Nations have signed off on the most recent agreement proposed by a coalition of environmental groups and adopted by the provincial government.

With a new threat to the ecosystem posed by the proposed Enbridge Northern Gateway pipeline, which would bring crude oil extracted from the Alberta tar sands to the town of Kitimat, up the coast, the bear’s services as a charismatic animal, good for raising funds and rallying people to the cause, are required again. The Natural Resources Defense Council, for instance, has recruited the bear in its new campaign to “Save the Spirit Bear Coast” and stop the pipeline. If it were constructed, tankers would have to navigate the narrow, rocky, 100-mile-long Douglas Channel, and a spill could be catastrophic.

The Moksgm’ol is also a cash cow, for the Spirit Bear Lodge and the other tour operators that take visitors to the islands and fjords where it lives. The bear, like the white buffalo of the American plains, is traditionally seen as a giver of good luck and power to those it appears to. One showed up when the Kita­soo/Xai’xais were building a new Big House in Klemtu in 2002. This was the first one built since the early 1900s, because missionaries and governments, after arriving in the late 19th century, had banned the ceremonies, dances and other cultural practices that took place in there. The spirit bear’s arrival was seen as propitious. It hung around for a few days, and then disappeared as mysteriously as it had come.

All of us by the river agree that the patient female we have been observing is no ordinary bear, and that we too have had a brief encounter with a very special being. We all high-five.

During the five and a half hours we hang out with the bears, we have plenty of time to take in the majesty of our surroundings. The crow in the alder is watching for salmon eggs washed out of nests to float down the river, as are the gulls and dippers on the river’s banks, and a juvenile eagle sits in the hemlock, his father keeping an eye on him from a nearby perch. Bobbing out in the surf are red phalaropes and, a first for me, a marbled murrelet, which, along with the also-threatened northern spotted owl, was used to combat the logging of California’s old-growth coastal forests. Out in the channel behind the research vessel, five humpback whales are spouting geysers as high as trees. They are bubble feeding, creating a net of air bubbles through which they will swim up from below with their mouths open and gobble up the disoriented krill.

Behind the forest that lines the sea, hidden from view, huge granite domes rise up to 5,000 feet. Some have waterfalls spurting down their sheer walls from higher, snow-fed lakes. Philip Charles says there are white mountain goats on the summits. In winter, when the shoreline is white with snow, the goats sometimes come down to feed on seaweed and mussels.

I have been, along with another of the bear watchers here, Melissa Groo, to many of the world’s Edens, including the bai, the clearing in the rainforest of the Central African Republic, where hundreds of forest elephants come out and carry on most of their social life. But this one is especially magical, even mystical. Not only because of the bears—and their gentle, nurturing side that we are witnessing—but because the whole ecosystem, swarming with life on land and sea, puts being alive into a perspective much different from our modern urban one. We are at one with all that surrounds us. We breathe the same air; we are all of a piece.

As my grandmother whispered to me on her deathbed, we are all transitional characters.

The Kitasoo have many stories about shape-shifting, with animals taking human form and vice versa. The greatest shape-shifter is the sea otter. Bears are regarded as particularly close to humans; if you take off the fur, bears become people. In one story, a woman is kidnapped by and marries a handsome man who is actually a bear, and they have three kids, with human faces and bear bodies. One of the kids is the color of snow because of a deal that Raven, a trickster and Creator of everything, had made with the black bears long ago. After turning himself into a child to learn how to make fire, Raven, then white, flew out through a hut’s smoke hole, singeing his wings and covering them with soot. He remained black for the rest of time, but he convinced the bears to agree that some of their cubs would be white.

In another story, told to the Canadian poet Lorna Crozier, people and animals could once talk to each other. The first bear to meet a human taught the human what plants to eat and how to catch salmon. The bear was about to teach the human all about hibernation, when another human came along and killed it with an arrow. This is why, the Kitasoo say, people have to collect food and firewood to make it through the winter, instead of sleeping through its cold, dark months.

In 2007 the provincial and federal governments, along with nongovernmental organizations, raised $120 million for a trust made available to the 27 nations in the Great Bear Rainforest, to use for the stewardship of the land and the well-being of the people. The Kita­soo/Xai’xais opted to use some of the money for ecotourism, and opened the Spirit Bear Lodge in 2008. Its success depends not only on the spirit bear, but also on the coastal black bears and the grizzlies, which also attract tourists and keep the ecosystem healthy. Doug Neasloss, 33, a member of the Raven (crest) clan, was a guide for Spirit Bear Lodge until he became chief councilor of Klemtu, a position he held until 2013. His first summer as a guide, he was returning to the lodge after viewing grizzlies with some clients when he passed a boat full of men who didn’t look like tourists. “I didn’t have a good feeling, and the next day I returned to where we watched the bears, and there was one that had been decapitated, skinned and its paws cut off.” Trophy hunters. There are also poachers only interested in selling bear livers to the lucrative Chinese market.

Neasloss’ concern about the bears brought him into contact with Chris Darimont, who was studying coastal wolves and occasionally came upon the remains of bears that had been killed by hunters. Darimont was the science director of an NGO called Raincoast Conservation Foundation, which raised $1.3 million to buy the hunting concession to an area in the Kitasoo/Xai’xais territory and beyond that was particularly thick with grizzlies. By owning the license, Raincoast prevents hunters from being able to shoot the bears there. In 2012, nine nations belonging to what is called the Great Bear Initiative voted to ban all bear hunting in their traditional territories, but the provincial government is still issuing licenses there. Darimont and Neasloss realized that the first step in protecting both grizzlies and black bears, including the white ones, was to collect baseline data about their numbers, movements, relatedness and behavior. William Housty, one of the Heiltsuk’s progressive young leaders, had reached the same conclusion. Housty, who has a degree in natural resource management, knew about a passive hair snag that others had used with success in the interior. It consists of a square of barbed wire maybe eight feet long on each side and a foot and a half off the ground, with a stack of sticks and moss in the middle that reek of fish. Suspended eight feet above, there’s an aluminum pie plate containing a cloth soaked with vanilla, loganberry or orange anise extract or beaver anal mucus, scents that any bear in the vicinity will pick up from miles away. As the bear steps over the barbed wire, some of its arm, belly or leg hair is caught in some of the tines, which it doesn’t even notice. And when the bear comes by the trap, night or day, infrared video cameras fixed to nearby trees start recording. Last spring traps were set at the mouths of 70 of Kitasoo/Xai’xais’ salmon-bearing rivers.

I spend a day with Neasloss and 28-year-old Krista Duncan, who collects the hair and video footage from the traps and rebaits them. The material is sent to a lab at the University of Victoria, where the DNA is extracted, along with other information, and matched up with the video. This noninvasive method of data-gathering, as opposed to darting and radio-collaring, is in keeping with the deep respect the coastal people have for the bears.

“We scientists are just beginning to catch up with the wealth of traditional and local ecological knowledge on the rainforest coast, which is what makes this collaboration so exciting,” Darimont says.

What the hair-trap data are showing so far is that the grizzlies are on the move, probably looking for rivers with more salmon, Neasloss and Darimont think. Some grizzlies are swimming out to the islands where the white bears are. When a grizzly appears on a river where black bears are feeding on salmon, the island bears, white ones included, bolt into the forest. The white and black bears probably won’t leave the islands entirely, Darimont says, but “they might eat less salmon, which is not great. Or they might switch to increased nocturnal foraging.”

We visit a bear trap that has been set up on the edge of a lake created by an artificial dam. Gold miners lived here until the 1940s, when the mine was shut down. In 2003 a logging company moved in, clear-cutting the slopes and loading the logs on ships, and then leaving everything behind, apparently in great haste: trailers, 20 fuel barrels still full, a pickup truck with the key in the ignition, a big rusting Caterpillar, even a daily logbook, which Neasloss finds in one of the trailers and takes. He is hopping mad about this toxic mess.

Near the trailers, in a patch of Labrador tea, is the hair trap, with two balls of fresh white fur on adjacent tines. A new white bear. There was no sign of it when Duncan checked the trap two weeks earlier. This is the sixth white bear whose hair she has found this year. She puts on blue plastic gloves and removes the hair with tweezers and puts it into a small yellow envelope and Ziploc bag. Then she burns the tines with a small blowtorch so no hair residue will mix with the next samples.

The next trap has been flooded by high tide and has black bear hair. It is on the edge of a forest of ancient red cedars, some thousand years old, Neasloss tells me. They have old man’s beard moss hanging from their lower branches, an epiphytic licorice fern that is thousands of times sweeter than sugar. He cuts me a slice of its stem to bite into and shows me a western yew tree, one of the hardest trees in the forest, from which bows and arrows were made.

The root system of one of the cedars has been hollowed out into a den, in which Neasloss finds black bear hair. One of the tree’s buttresses has been chopped long ago by what he recognizes was a nephrite ax, the green jade axes that the coastal people used until 1846, when they adopted steel axes. The nephrite came from two locations in what is now Washington State and was traded up and down the coast. Someone probably chopped out enough of the tree’s buttress to make a mask.

We visit Jess Housty, William Housty’s 28-year-old sister, in Bella Bella, the capital of the Heiltsuk nation, on Campbell Island, southeast of Klemtu. She too is involved in the struggle to regain indigenous British Columbians’ sovereignty over their own territories and is a powerful speaker. She has described the coast as vital “on a deeply intimate and personal level because it’s the place where my ancestors’ bones are buried. It’s the place that’s in my veins, that’s imprinted in my DNA....There’s no other geography in the world where I make sense.”

She is working with Neasloss on fighting the Northern Gateway pipeline. Her strategy is to get the coastal nations’ customary marine territory—not only their land but also the sections of sea they have fished for centuries—recognized as such, which would give them control over who could come in and out. They could then stop the nonnative fishermen who are taking so many salmon out of the rivers, and prevent the tankers from using Douglas Channel.

She tells me that the Heiltsuk, like the Kitasoo, believe there is no distinction between the land and the water. “Every land animal has a supernatural sea counterpart. There are sea bears who are the counterparts of the grizzlies and black bears and spirit bears.” And the land bears around here spend most of their waking time in the water and get most of their protein from it, so they’re semi-aquatic themselves, I suggest.

Two weeks after my visit, a Russian tanker full of oil, diesel fuel and a mix of other hydrocarbons loses power and goes adrift off the rocky coast of Haida Gwaii, the archipelago west of the Great Bear Rainforest. An American tugboat that happens to be in the port of Prince Rupert, on the Alaska border, gets to the tanker before it is dashed to pieces. Darimont emails that he is hugely relieved, but part of him wishes it had come closer to being a real disaster. The provincial government needs to realize the folly of letting tankers go up and down the Douglas Channel, he says. The Canadian government, eager to sell its tar sands bitumen to China, has green-lighted the Northern Gateway pipeline, but there is a lot of opposition to it in British Columbia, and at least 14 nations on its route from Alberta to Kitimat have vowed to fight it every step of the way.

Darimont thinks the pipeline, whether it happens or not, is a blessing in disguise, because it has united nations in the Great Bear Rainforest that at times didn’t get along. With threats from hunting, climate change, overfishing and the movement of the grizzlies looming, the spirit bear and the mysterious ecocosmos that is its home need all the defenders they can get.

After the tide went out, mother and child emerged from the forest again and ate kelp and scraped acorn barnacles off the rocks. There is a Kitasoo expression: When the tide is out, the table is set. At one point, the two of them came within ten feet of us, and acted as if we didn’t exist. We sat frozen in elation, in a collective rapture, flooded with love for the bear and her cub and for each other, even though some of us, bear and human, were meeting for the first—and last—time.

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Current Research

WRI is conducting the longest and most in-depth bear study ever done.  In recognizing this study as one of the four major studies of large mammals in the world, Harvard University Professor E. O. Wilson wrote, "A new level of resolution has been attained, in which free-ranging individuals are tracked from birth through socialization, parturition, and death, and their idiosyncrasies, personal alliances, and ecological relationships recorded in clinical detail." 

The research has produced over a hundred scientific publications—more than any other bear study.   The publications are among the most groundbreaking and most cited publications in bear literature according to the International Bear Association.  Awards include the Anna M. Jackson Award from the American Society of Mammalogists and the Quality Research Award from the U. S. Forest Service. 

WRI is doing unique research that requires longer commitment than usually is possible for graduate students or government agencies.   Some of the research topics require knowledge of kinship, which requires study over generations.  Other topics involve comparisons between years of good and poor natural food, which requires sample sizes of several years of good and poor food.  Other topics involve changes in habitat, which takes years of forest growth and/or housing development.   To observe bear behavior requires years to develop trusting relationships. 

As topics come to fruition, results will be published in scientific journals and shared with the public in books and as exhibits at the North American Bear Center.

Research is focused on a clan whose matriarch was born in 1987. The studies are being conducted through the Wildlife Research Institute’s Field Station located in the study area.

Research topics are grouped as follows: 

Land tenure and social systems of black bears

• The matriarchal social system of black bears in NE Minnesota
• Establishment of territories by four generations of females from a clan of black bears in NE Minnesota 
• Annual changes in territories of black bears in NE Minnesota
• Effects of food supply (natural and supplemental) and kinship on social behavior, movements, and population growth of black bears in NE Minnesota
• Grooming behavior and its relation to kinship and mating in black bears in NE Minnesota
• How relationships change among black bear littermates in NE Minnesota
• How relationships change between mothers and offspring in the years following family breakup by black bears in NE Minnesota
• Variability in family breakup procedures of black bears in NE Minnesota
• Effects of food supply on dispersal by juvenile male black bears from their mothers' territories in NE Minnesota
• Relationships among four generations of females in a black bear clan in NE Minnesota  
• Fighting behavior of black bears in NE Minnesota
• Cannibalism and infanticide by black bears in NE Minnesota

Communication

• Vocalizations and body language of black bears in NE Minnesota
• Scent-marking behaviors of black bears in NE Minnesota

Daily and seasonal travel patterns

• Seasonal changes in travel patterns of black bears in NE Minnesota
• Seasonal changes in daily activity patterns of black bears in NE Minnesota
• Effects of glacier movements on current travels of black bears in NE Minnesota 

Black bears and humans

• Factors influencing conflict between humans and black bears in NE Minnesota
• Responses of black bears to humans in NE Minnesota
• Consequences of people feeding and habituating black bears in NE Minnesota
• Causes of bear attacks and methods for avoiding attacks
• Techniques for minimizing house break-ins by black bears
• Does supplemental feeding change the social organization and land tenure system of black bears in NE Minnesota?
• Does supplemental feeding introduce black bears to nuisance activity or act as a buffer against nuisance activity? 
• Does unlimited high quality supplemental food make bears dependent upon it? 
• Daily activities of black bears with access to unlimited high quality supplemental food
• Does habituation to humans create nuisance bears? 
• Effectiveness of bear-proof garbage containers in preventing access by black bears in NE Minnesota
• Black bear responses to pepper spray and other aversive conditioning techniques in NE Minnesota
• Can nuisance bears be deterred if attractants are reduced and aversive conditioning is practiced at nuisance locations?
• Using a carrot and stick approach: is aversive conditioning more effective with diversionary food? 
• Changes in attitudes with education about black bears in NE Minnesota
• Survival tactics of mature males during hunting seasons in NE Minnesota
• Aspects of black bear habituation to humans in NE Minnesota
• Effects of supplemental feeding on home range size and travels of black bears in NE Minnesota
• Safety in black bear country
• Attacks and killings by black bears in North America
• Methods for avoiding conflict with black bears in NE Minnesota

Food and weight

• Seasonal changes in diets of black bears in NE Minnesota
• Annual changes in diets of black bears in NE Minnesota  
• Food preferences of black bears in NE Minnesota 
• Daily food consumption by black bears in NE Minnesota
• Consumption of toxic foods and foods of medicinal value by black bears in NE Minnesota
• Seasonal changes in weight of black bears in NE Minnesota: how it differs with age and sex
• Long distance movements to food supplies by black bears after changes in wind direction in NE Minnesota
• How long range movements by black bears differ by age, sex, and season in NE Minnesota
• Use of fish by black bears near Ely, Minnesota
• Predatory behavior of black bears in NE Minnesota
• Ant species selected by black bears in NE Minnesota
• Detection of ant colonies by black bears in NE Minnesota
• Differential digestion of food types and its effects on results of scat analyses
• Responses of black bears to food shortages in NE Minnesota
• Foraging patterns of black bears in NE Minnesota
• Age-related changes in rate of weight gain by black bears in NE Minnesota

Reproduction

• Courtship and mating activities of female black bears in NE Minnesota
• Courtship and mating activities of male black bears in NE Minnesosta
• Effects of food supply on age of first reproduction, litter size, and cub survival of black bears in NE Minnesota
• Incest avoidance by black bears in NE Minnesota
• Age-related changes in litter size and overall reproductive rate by black bears in NE Minnesota

Hibernation

• Prehibernation activities of black bears in NE Minnesota
• Seasonal changes in bedding behavior by black bears in NE Minnesota
• Denning chronology by sex, age, weight, and reproductive status of black bears in NE Minnesota
• Characteristics of black bear dens in NE Minnesota
• Time spent in den construction: false starts, digging, and lining different types of dens. 
• Den differences in relation to black bear age, sex, and reproductive status
• Re-use of dens by black bears in NE Minnesota
• Formation and elimination of the anal plug by hibernating black bears in NE Minnesota
• Seasonal changes in heart rates and body temperature of black bears in NE Minnesota
• Effects of body composition on hibernation behavior and physiology

Care and development of cubs

• Parturition dates of black bears in NE Minnesota
• Maternal care of newborn cubs in NE Minnesota
• Maternal defense of cubs by black bears in NE Minnesota
• Development of black bear cubs in NE Minnesota
• Development of climbing ability by black bears in NE Minnesota
• Early establishment of teat order by black bear cubs in NE Minnesota
• Factors influencing milk production by female black bears in NE Minnesota
• Seasonal changes in frequency of nursing by black bear cubs in NE Minnesota
• Age-related changes in play behavior of black bears in NE Minnesota
• Effects of family breakup on play behavior in black bears in NE Minnesota
• Seasonal and annual changes in play behavior
• Use of tamarack saplings and other objects in the play behavior of black bears in NE Minnesota
• Effects of food supply on play behavior of black bears in NE Minnesota

Morphology, Physiology, and Abilities

• Sexual dimorphism of black bears in NE Minnesota
• Hearing abilities of black bears
• Seasonal and age-related changes in heart rate by black bears in NE Minnesota
• Seasonal changes in body temperature of black bears in NE Minnesota
• Temperature regulation in black bears in NE Minnesota
• Color phases of black bears in NE Minnesota
• Hair growth and molting patterns by black bears in NE Minnesota
• Age-related changes in pelage of black bears in NE Minnesota
• Navigation, orientation, and homing behavior by black bears in NE Minnesota
• Relative weights of organs and other body parts of black bears in NE Minnesota
• Age determination from dental patterns of black bears in NE Minnesota
• Morphology of black bear dentition, tongue, and digestive tract: adaptations for omnivory
• Walking and running speeds of black bears in NE Minnesota
• Distribution of scent glands on black bears in NE Minnesota
• Intelligence of black bears in NE Minnesota
• Differences between black bear and grizzly bear behavior
• Life expectancy of black bears in NE Minnesota
• Parasites of black bears, their threats to humans, and how bears deal with parasite loads during hibernation
• Interpreting bear sign in NE Minnesota.  Categories include tracks, scats, scent-marks, beds, and foraging sign.
• Functions of tree-marking behavior by black bears in NE Minnesota
• Selection of marking trees by black bears in NE Minnesota
• Social marking behavior and how it differs with age, sex, and season in NE Minnesota
• Differences in tree-biting behavior between male and female black bears in NE Minnesota
• Use of mature white pines by mothers with cubs in NE Minnesota
• Habitat selection by black bears in NE Minnesota
• Forest management practices that benefit black bears in NE Minnesota
• Seed dispersal by black bears in NE Minnesota
• Effects of weather on habitat selection by black bears in NE Minnesota

Responses to environmental factors

• Responses of black bears to predators, reptiles, biting insects, rain, sun, hail, heat, humidity, cold, and wind in NE Minnesota.
• Responses of black bears to natural and manmade sights and sounds that are potential disturbances to black bears in NE Minnesota.

Research methods

• Factors limiting accuracy of telemetry locations of black bears in NE Minnesota
• Methods for obtaining ecological data of black bears in NE Minnesota
• Methods for radio-collaring black bears without tranquilizers in NE Minnesota

In addition to local research, WRI networks with researchers and organizations across North America to compare behavior, habitat, and methods for dealing with bear-human conflict.  

White bears can walk long distances: The effects of an instruction to ignore information located in a visually differentiated location on attitude change over time

• Published: 19 October 2021
• Volume 42 , pages 11079–11100, ( 2023 )

Cite this article

• Michal Shapira   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-8398-0838 1 ,
• Erez Yaakobi 1 &
• David Mazursky 2  

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Works dealing with the Attentional White-Bear theory show that people allocate attention to a location they were told to ignore. However, studies have not examine whether the content presented in the ignored location had an impact on participants’ attitudes. To explore this question we provide a novel demonstration of the joint effects of the Attentional White-Bear and the Sleeper effect, and show that an instruction to ignore a specific predefined location in the visual field generates attention to the content in that location which influences attitudes. In four longitudinal experiments, a Sleeper effect was revealed. However this effect was eliminated when participants were requested to ignore the predefined location of the discounting cue (Experiments 1 and 3), the persuasive message (Experiment 2) and the incongruent background (Experiment 4). The comparative findings for the parallel groups exposed to the same information (both persuasive and discounting) without the ignoring instruction point to the critical role of this instruction as the source of the difference in attitude change. The discussion centers on the implications regarding the strategic buildup of communicating information that can attract audience’s attention in novel unexpected ways. These counterintuitive effects provide an uncommon strategic perspective: paradoxically, in order to generate attention to a message, the target audience should be instructed to ignore its location.

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Acknowledgements

The authors wish to thank Tahani Hasadia, Natalya Gltelson, Tomer Cohen, Snir Niv, Smadar Nachman, Yaara Moldovan, Svetlana Butina and Natalya Gumzaikov for assistance in the messages’ development and collecting the data for this paper.

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Michal Shapira & Erez Yaakobi

The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Jerusalem, Israel

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The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

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This appendix includes the materials presented to participants in Experiments 1–4.

Experiment 1

A new brand of car is scheduled to be imported to the country in the near future. The car operates on a combined system of solar and electric energy and has several other unique features. In the following pages you will find additional information about the car. You will then be requested to respond to several questions. Your opinion is vitally important as it will be used to develop a marketing strategy for the new car.

The questionnaire is formulated in the masculine for convenience only and applies equally to males and females.

This is an anonymous questionnaire. Please identify yourself by entering the last four digits of your I.D. number here:

Thank you for your cooperation.

A. Participants in the message only condition received the following material:

First, please read the following information and then answer the questions:

SunElectro is a new car marketed in Israel that operates on a combined system of solar and electric energy. The combination of these two sources of energy is considered a technological breakthrough both in the automotive industry and in the innovative technologies industries. The car windows are covered with a UV-filter protection system. The car is economical and environmentally friendly. Its other positive features include an automatic braking system that operates when nearby objects are sensed, and easily adjustable side mirrors.

Similar cars have been launched in several Western European countries and in North America. Israeli car importers have already signed agreements with the manufacturer to adapt the car to the local market. Results of preliminary studies and focus groups indicate a positive response and high intention to purchase the new car. Consumers who test-drove the new car reported high levels of satisfaction and driving enjoyment, and significant cost savings.

Please proceed to the next page and complete the questionnaire. Do not go back to previous pages.

B. Participants in the message and discounting cue condition received the following material:

First, please read the following information and then answer the following questions.

C. Participants in the to-be-ignored discounting cue location condition received the following materials:

Attitude Questionnaire

Respond to the following questions on a scale from 1 ( absolutely no ) to 7 ( absolutely yes ).

In your opinion, is the SunElectro a high-quality car?

In your opinion, would the SunElectro be a good choice for you?

In your opinion, is the SunElectro suitable for broad audiences as a replacement for their current car?

Do you plan to purchase a SunElectro?

In your opinion, will Israeli drivers be interested in the SunElectro?

Do you think it would be fun to drive the SunElectro?

Would you recommend the SunElectro to others?

Do you think that SunElectro offers added value over other cars that are already available on the market?

Will you follow the media coverage of SunElectro’s upcoming launch?

Do you think that the SunElectro will become a popular purchase for average Israeli families in a few years?

Experiment 2

Dear Participant,

Please complete the brief questionnaire below that is part of a market research study. In the following pages you will find additional information about a new low-cost airline. You will then be requested to respond to several questions. Your opinion is vitally important as it will be used to develop a marketing strategy for the new low cost airline.

This is an anonymous questionnaire. Please identify yourself by entering the last four digits of your I.D. number in the spaces below.

First, please read the following information and then answer the following questions:

Maalot Airlines is a new low-cost Israeli carrier. The airline operates in a low-cost format. Its low prices are made possible due to the absence of traditional services such as meals, beverages and in-flight movies, which are available only at extra cost. Low-cost airlines first appeared in the United States and spread from there to Europe in the 1990s and are currently popular all over the world due to high customer satisfaction from the flights themselves and the significant cost savings. On these flights you can enjoy very low prices and a low rate of delays (due to the use of secondary airports). Tickets are available for direct purchase online without the mediation of travel agents.

Surfers are divided: Are low-cost flights worth it or not? Maalot Airlines’ first low-cost flight sparked responses from surfers: Not worth it at all, or cheap and worth it? How can you manage without water being served on the flight, and who checks the sandwiches you bring from home?

Coverage of Maalot Airlines’ first low-cost flight to Paris prompted many surfers to express their strong opinions on the issue. “Not worth it at all,” Yehuda from Tivon who explained: “It’s only worth it for people who make reservations three months in advance. Then, you can prepare for the flight, bring an empty bottle and fill it up when you while for the flight; come early and get a good seat.” The rules of low-cost flights are completely different to what we have become accustomed to for decades, and all airlines operate flights have a long list of services that go with a seat on a plane such as food, beverages, luggage and overweight baggage, reserved seats, and other services. All of these are sold at extra cost. “Do all the sandwiches from home go through a security check?” wondered one surfer. “After all, you can easily hide explosives in a baguette.” Another surfer responded that everything undergoes a security check and an X-ray. A lively discussion among surfers developed over the question of whether the airline is obligated to serve water to the passengers or whether it can charge passengers. “Water should be available to anyone in any place of business,” wrote D. from Herzliya. “Although an airplane is not a place of business, it certainly belongs to the company that is doing business and therefore both it and the plane are subject to the law. Do they really want people to beg the flight attendant for a drink or drink from the faucet in the toilet?” A surfer identified as Dracula responded, “Hook up to the flight attendant and drink her blood.”

C. Participants in the to-Be-Ignored Message Location Condition Received the Following Material:

Maalot Airlines is a new low-cost Israeli carrier. The airline operates in a low-cost format. Its low prices are made possible due to the absence of traditional services such as meals, beverages and in-flight movies, which are available only at extra cost. Low-cost airlines first appeared in the United States and spread from there to Europe in the 1990s and are currently popular all over the world due to high customer satisfaction from the flights themselves and the significant cost savings. On these flights you can enjoy very low prices and a low rate of delays (due to the use of secondary airports). Tickets are available for direct purchase online without the medication of travel agents.

Surfers are divided: Are low-cost flights worth it or not? Maalot Airlines’ first low-cost flight sparked responses from Ynet surfers: Not worth it at all, or cheap and worth it? How can you manage without water being served on the flight, and who checks the sandwiches you bring from home?

Coverage of Maalot Airlines’ first low-cost flight to Paris prompted many surfersto express their strong opinions on the issue. “Not worth it at all,” Yehuda from Tivon decided and explained, “It’s only worth it for people who make reservations three months in advance. Then, you can prepare for the flight, bring an empty bottle and fill it up while you wait for the flight; come early and get a good seat.” The rules of low-cost flights are completely different to what we have become accustomed to for decades, and all the airlines operate flights that jave a long list of services that go with a seat on a plane – food, beverages, luggage and overweight baggage, reserved seats, and other services. All of these are sold at extra cost. “Do all the sandwiches from home go through a security check?” wondered one surfer. “After all, you can easily hide explosives in a baguette.” Another surfer responded that everything undergoes a security check and an X-ray. A lively discussion among the surfers developed over the question of whether the airline is obligated to serve water to the passengers or whether it can charge passengers. “Water should be available to anyone in any place of business,” wrote D from Herzliya. “Although an airplane is not a place of business it certainly belongs to the company that is doing business and therefore both it and the plane are subject to the law. Do they really want people to beg the flight attendant for a drink or drink from the faucet in the toilet?” A surfer identified as Dracula responded, “Hook up to the flight attendant and drink her blood.”

Please ignore the information in Part A.

Please respond to the following questions on a scale from 1 ( absolutely no ) to 7 ( absolutely yes ):

In your opinion, does Maalot Airlines offer good value for money?

In your opinion, will Maalot Airlines’ customers be satisfied?

In your opinion, will there be a strong demand for tickets on Maalot Airlines?

Would you consider the purchase of a ticket on Maalot Airlines?

Do you think you would be satisfied with the value you get for flying with Maalot Airlines?

Experiment 3

Break of Day is the name of a new film that will soon be shown in movie theaters in Israel. The movie combines several genres but is classified as a drama. The length of the movie is 120 min and includes comic and romantic interludes alongside breathtaking action scenes.

Please read the reviews of the movie below and complete the questionnaire. Your opinion will help the distributors design a marketing campaign for the movie. Note that there are no correct or incorrect answers. Your opinion is vitally important as it will be used to develop a marketing strategy for the new movie.

A. Participants in the high credibility source and supporting cue condition received the following material:

Please look at the movie poster that will appear in the media and read the movie reviews below. Then complete the questionnaire.

A new movie called Break of Day is scheduled to be released in Israel in the next few days. This is an American film by an acclaimed director. This is his first movie in a decade, and he worked on the movie for eight years. The movie is a melodrama that combines comic moments alongside breathtaking action scenes.

B. Participants in the low credibility source and discounting cue condition received the following material:

C. Participants in the to-be-ignored two locations received the following material:

Respond to the following questions on a scale from 1 ( absolutely no ) to 7 ( absolutely yes ):

In your opinion, is Break of Day a high-quality movie?

Do you intend to see the movie?

In your opinion, will Break of Day become a blockbuster?

In your opinion, is Break of Day suitable for a broad range of audiences and can compete with other movies that are currently being shown in movie theaters?

Does Break of Day match your taste?

In your opinion, will the movie interest Israeli audiences?

Do you think that it would be fun to see Break of Day ?

Do you think you would recommend the movie to others?

Would you pay NIS 38 (12$) to see the movie?

Do you plan to follow the coverage of the movie’s upcoming launch in the media?

Do you think that Break of Day will be the list of the best movies of all time?

Experiment 4

Mountain Springs, a new brand of mineral water, will soon be launched in Israel. The marketing company is conducting a survey to develop the best strategy to introduce the brand in Israel.

In the following pages you will find additional information about the new brand of mineral water. You will then be requested to respond to several questions. Your opinion is vitally important as it will be used to develop a marketing strategy for the new brand of mineral water.

A. Participants in the neutral background condition received the following material:

Read the following information about Mountain Springs and look at the product image. Then answer the questions below.

Mountain Springs contains natural water that is known to be rich in vitamins and minerals closest in concentration to that of the human body. Almost all adults know that the body is made up of 70% water, but not everyone knows that it is much healthier to drink natural water with a concentration of minerals and vitamins that is closest to that of the human body than other beverages. That is because ordinary water, filtered water, and water that is artificially enhanced with minerals cannot accurately simulate the composition of minerals and micro-elements that creates the best balance needed for the human body.

B. Participants in the incongruent background condition received the following material:

Mountain Springs contains natural water that is known to be rich in vitamins and minerals closest in concentration to that of the human body. Almost all adults know that the body is made up of 70% water, but not everyone knows that it is much healthier to drink natural water with a concentration of minerals and vitamins that is closest to that of the human body than other beverages. That is because ordinary water, filtered water and water that is artificially enhanced with minerals cannot accurately simulate the composition of minerals and micro-elements that creates the best balance needed for the human body.

C. Participants in the to-be-ignored incongruent background condition received the following material:

Read the following information about Mountain Springs. Look at the product image but ignore the food items in the background . Then answer the questions below.

Mountain Springs contains natural water that is known to be rich in vitamins and minerals closest in concentration to that of the human body. Almost all adults know that the body is made up of 70% water, but not everyone knows that it is much healthier to drink natural water with a concentration of minerals and vitamins that is closest to that of the human body than other beverages. This is because ordinary water, filtered water and water that is artificially enhanced with minerals cannot accurately simulate the composition of minerals and micro-elements that creates the best balance needed for the human body.

Is Mountain Springs good for your health?

How healthy is Mountain Springs in your opinion?

To what extent does Mountain Springs match your lifestyle?

What is the likelihood that you would buy Mountain Springs?

In your opinion, how successful will Mountain Springs be?

How much do you like Mountain Springs?

Would you recommend Mountain Springs mineral water to others?

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About this article

Shapira, M., Yaakobi, E. & Mazursky, D. White bears can walk long distances: The effects of an instruction to ignore information located in a visually differentiated location on attitude change over time. Curr Psychol 42 , 11079–11100 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-021-02400-4

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Accepted : 11 October 2021

Published : 19 October 2021

Issue Date : May 2023

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-021-02400-4

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What is a polar bear?

What are some examples of polar bear adaptations, are polar bears an endangered species.

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A polar bear is a great white northern bear (family Ursidae) found throughout the Arctic region. Except for one subspecies of grizzly bear , the polar bear is the largest and most powerful carnivore on land. It has no natural predators and knows no fear of humans, making it an extremely dangerous animal.

What do polar bears eat?

Polar bears are mostly carnivorous. They eat the ringed seal as well as the bearded seal and other pinnipeds . Additionally, polar bears are opportunistic as well as predatory: they will consume dead fish and carcasses of stranded whales and eat garbage near human settlements.

One important adaptation of polar bears to their unique climate is the transparency of their thick fur, which allows sunlight to pass through and reach their black skin, where heat from the sun is then absorbed. Another adaptation is polar bears’ use of only their front limbs when swimming, which is found in no other four-legged mammal .

No, polar bears are not an endangered species, but they are threatened. In 2015 the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Polar Bear Specialist Group designated polar bears as a vulnerable species. According to the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species , the category of vulnerable, as distinct from the category of endangered, means that polar bears have a slightly lower risk of extinction than if they were endangered.

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polar bear , ( Ursus maritimus ), great white northern bear (family Ursidae) found throughout the Arctic region. The polar bear travels long distances over vast desolate expanses, generally on drifting oceanic ice floes, searching for seals, its primary prey. The polar bear is the largest and most powerful carnivore on land, a title it shares with a subspecies of brown bear called the Kodiak bear . It has no natural predators and knows no fear of humans, making it an extremely dangerous animal .

Polar bears are stocky, with a long neck, relatively small head, short, rounded ears, and a short tail. The male, which is much larger than the female, weighs 410 to 720 kg (900 to 1,600 pounds). It grows to about 1.6 metres (5.3 feet) tall at the shoulder and 2.2–2.5 metres in length. The tail is 7–12 cm (3–5 inches) long. Sunlight can pass through the thick fur, its heat being absorbed by the bear’s black skin. Under the skin is a layer of insulating fat. The broad feet have hairy soles to protect and insulate as well as to facilitate movement across ice, as does the uneven skin on the soles of the feet, which helps to prevent slipping. Strong, sharp claws are also important for gaining traction, for digging through ice, and for killing prey.

Polar bears are solitary and overwhelmingly carnivorous, feeding especially on the ringed seal but also on the bearded seal and other pinnipeds . The bear stalks seals resting on the ice, ambushes them near breathing holes, and digs young seals from snow shelters where they are born. Polar bears prefer ice that is subject to periodic fracturing by wind and sea currents, because these fractures offer seals access to both air and water. As their prey is aquatic, polar bears are excellent swimmers, and they are even known to kill beluga whales . In swimming , the polar bear uses only its front limbs, an aquatic adaptation found in no other four-legged mammal . Polar bears are opportunistic as well as predatory: they will consume dead fish and carcasses of stranded whales and eat garbage near human settlements.

Mating occurs in spring, and implantation of the fertilized ovum is delayed. Including the delay, gestation may last 195–265 days, and one to four cubs, usually two, are born during the winter in a den of ice or snow. Cubs weigh less than 1 kg at birth and are not weaned until after they are two years old. Young polar bears may die of starvation or may be killed by adult males, and for this reason female polar bears are extremely defensive of their young when adult males are present. Young remain with their mothers until they reach sexual maturity. Females first reproduce at four to eight years of age and breed every two to four years thereafter. Males mature at about the same age as females but do not breed until a few years later. Adult polar bears have no natural predators, though walruses and wolves can kill them. Longevity in the wild is 25 to 30 years, but in captivity several polar bears have lived to more than 35 years old.

Humans probably cause most polar bear deaths, by hunting and by destroying problem animals near settlements. Polar bears have been known to kill people. The bears are hunted especially by Inuit people for their hides, tendons, fat, and flesh. Although polar bear meat is consumed by indigenous people, the liver is inedible and often poisonous because of its high vitamin A content.

An estimated 22,000 to 31,000 polar bears were living in the wild by 2020. The  International Union for Conservation of Nature  (IUCN) has classified the polar bear as a vulnerable species since 2006, and the U.S. government has listed the polar bear as a threatened species since 2008, in large part because of the influence of global warming , which continues to reduce Arctic sea ice coverage. Sea ice is prime habitat for polar bears. Population models have predicted increased rates of starvation as a result of longer ice-free seasons and a decline in mating success, since sea ice fragmentation could reduce encounter rates between males and females. Ecological studies show evidence that declines in sea ice coverage have forced polar bears to spend more time foraging for berries and seabird eggs, which are lower-quality foods that require greater effort to obtain. Given the compounding threats to the species, model forecasts suggest that polar bear populations will have declined by one-third by the year 2050.

Ironic Process Theory & The White Bear Experiment

Saul McLeod, PhD

Editor-in-Chief for Simply Psychology

BSc (Hons) Psychology, MRes, PhD, University of Manchester

Saul McLeod, PhD., is a qualified psychology teacher with over 18 years of experience in further and higher education. He has been published in peer-reviewed journals, including the Journal of Clinical Psychology.

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Olivia Guy-Evans, MSc

Associate Editor for Simply Psychology

BSc (Hons) Psychology, MSc Psychology of Education

Olivia Guy-Evans is a writer and associate editor for Simply Psychology. She has previously worked in healthcare and educational sectors.

On This Page:

The ironic process theory posits that sometimes our efforts to control our minds result in the opposite outcome of what we intended.

Rather than successfully suppressing or directing certain thoughts or feelings, we may inadvertently amplify them. This phenomenon isn’t random but is fundamentally rooted in how we exercise mental control.

There are generally two processes at play, as posited by Wegner (1994):

• Controlled (or intentional) process: This is the conscious effort you make to suppress or avoid the unwanted thought. For example, when you try not to think about a white bear, you actively focus on other things to distract yourself.
• Automatic (or ironic) process: This unconscious mechanism checks whether you think about the unwanted thought. The catch is that to check if you’re thinking about, say, a white bear, it has to bring the concept of the white bear to mind. This system, when triggered, can override the intentional operating process, leading to counterintentional outcomes. Thus, it ironically keeps the unwanted thought in your consciousness.

White Bear Experiment

Wegner, D. M., Schneider, D. J., Carter, S. R., & White, T. L. (1987). Paradoxical effects of thought suppression.  Journal of personality and Social Psychology ,  53 (1), 5.

The study was designed to examine the nature of thought suppression. Participants were placed in a setting where they were asked to vocalize their immediate thoughts, expressing whatever came to their mind in a free-flowing manner over a set duration.

Instructions:

The participants received a seemingly straightforward directive: they were to avoid thinking about a white bear during this stream-of-consciousness exercise.

To track how often this directive failed, they were provided a bell and instructed to ring it every time they inadvertently thought of the white bear.

Contrary to what one might expect from such a directive, participants frequently rang the bell, indicating that the thought of the white bear intruded into their consciousness regularly.

Even more intriguingly, a subsequent phase of the experiment revealed that participants who were initially told to suppress thoughts of the white bear and were later instructed to actively think about it ended up thinking about the bear more often than another group that was simply asked to think about the bear without the initial suppression directive.

Implications:

The results of this “White Bear Study” highlight a counterintuitive psychological phenomenon: when individuals try to consciously suppress a specific thought, that thought can become more persistent and dominant in their mind.

Instead of achieving the desired outcome of avoiding the thought, the act of suppression appears to amplify its presence, making it more recurrent and noticeable.

Susceptibility to Ironic Effects

The ironic process theory posits that counterintentional (or “ironic”) effects are most prevalent when individuals attempt to control their thoughts under challenging conditions like stress, mental load, or time pressure.

There are two primary ways these ironic effects can manifest (Wegner, 1994):

1. Adverse Conditions

Stressful environments, mental distractions, and time constraints can reduce the mental capacity needed to exercise control.

This diminished capacity makes individuals more susceptible to counterintentional outcomes.

Therapeutic approaches that focus on reducing stress or promoting a peaceful state of mind can decrease the chances of these ironic errors and help individuals align with their true intentions.

2. Intent for Mental Control

Merely having the intention to control one’s thoughts can lead to ironic outcomes. For example, the more one tries not to think about sleep, the more challenging it might become to fall asleep.

Relaxing the effort to control specific thoughts can be a solution in such cases.

However, giving up on mental control is easier said than done, especially when one believes that achieving a certain mental state is crucial.

Resistance to Ironic Effects

To resist ironic effects (where trying not to think about something makes you think about it more), people can:

• Avoid Mental Overload: Keep your mind uncluttered.
• Be Careful with Mental Control: Be deliberate about when and how you try to control your thoughts.
• Automate Thought Processes: Just like how repetitive actions (like typing) become automatic over time, repeated mental practices can become automatic, too. This means they require less conscious effort and might be less prone to errors.

When individuals become overly conscious of these automatic actions, mistakes might increase, potentially because the ironic monitoring process interferes with the previously automatic action.

Thus, instances where individuals “choke under pressure” might be due to the transition from an automatic action to an intentional one, losing the immunity to ironic effects that automaticity provides.

Ultimately, making mental control automatic might increase its effectiveness. For instance, individuals who frequently practice thought suppression could develop such an automatic mechanism that they efficiently suppress thoughts with fewer ironic intrusions.

Similarly, repeated practice in relaxation or mood control might enable individuals to achieve effective self-regulation, bypassing the pitfalls of ironic processes. Some individuals, through consistent practice, might transform mental control activities into habits, exhibiting advanced self-control skills.

Paradoxical Intention

Paradoxical intention is a therapeutic technique developed in the context of logotherapy by Viktor Frankl , an Austrian neurologist and psychiatrist.

This method involves instructing a patient to intentionally engage in or exaggerate a feared behavior or thought. By doing so, the anxiety produced by the behavior or thought is often reduced or eliminated.

How It Works:

• Confrontation: Instead of running from or fighting against a particular symptom or behavior, the individual is asked to intentionally and willfully engage in it.
• Reduction of Fear: By deliberately engaging in the behavior or thought, the fear or anxiety associated with it can diminish. The paradox is that by trying to experience what we fear, we often lessen the fear itself.
• Humor and Perspective: The exaggeration of the symptom can also make the individual see it in a humorous or absurd light, providing a fresh perspective.
• Insomnia: A person who fears not being able to sleep might be asked to try to stay awake as long as possible. By doing so, the pressure and anxiety of trying to sleep are removed, often making it easier for the person to fall asleep.
• Social Anxiety: Someone who fears stuttering in public might be asked to stutter on purpose. This can help the individual confront the fear head-on, realize that the worst-case scenario isn’t as bad as imagined, and diminish the anxiety over time.

But, using this knowledge to trick the ironic process might not always work, especially if one remains aware of the initial intention. More research is needed to understand how people can navigate and mitigate their tendencies toward ironic outcomes.

Implications

The theory and its empirical findings are foundational in psychology and have implications for understanding various psychological phenomena, like obsessive thoughts, post-traumatic stress disorder, and even everyday experiences like trying not to think about a particular embarrassing incident or craving.

The more you try to push the thought away, the more it seems to occupy your mind.

The theory has implications beyond simple thought suppression. It has been used to explain various phenomena such as:

• Rebound effects: After suppressing a thought, it might come back even more strongly when suppression ceases.
• Counterproductive performance in high-pressure situations: Think of the athlete told not to miss the shot. The pressure not to miss can lead to an ironic increase in the likelihood of missing.
• Insomnia: Trying hard not to think about the fact that you can’t sleep can make falling asleep even harder.

There are also potential implications in areas like therapy, where it’s important to understand that telling someone not to think about a traumatic event might lead to increased focus on it.

Instead, some therapies, like acceptance and commitment therapy ( ACT ), focus on accepting and observing thoughts without judgment rather than trying to suppress them.

Trying too hard to sleep, especially with distractions, can actually keep you awake. On the other hand, trying to stay awake, especially when mentally tired, might make you fall asleep faster.

Telling insomniacs to stay awake can actually help them sleep better. When they stop trying to sleep, it reduces the stress and worry which typically keeps them awake. Conversely, instructing them to sleep quickly can delay sleep onset.

There’s a debate about which is better for managing pain: distracting from the pain or focusing on it. While the common advice, like at the dentist’s, is to distract oneself, some research suggests paying attention to pain might sometimes be better.

Research indicates that distraction is generally better for short-term, acute pain. However, for chronic or ongoing pain, focusing on it (known as “sensory monitoring”) might be more effective. The reason is tied to how our minds work.

When we try to distract ourselves from pain, our brain keeps looking for things that aren’t the distraction, including the pain. Over time, this can lead to us feeling the pain more.

On the other hand, when we focus on the pain, our brain looks for anything but the pain. This means, after a while, we might actually feel less pain as our brain looks for other sensations.

Choosing to focus on the pain might be uncomfortable initially, but it could lead to relief later on because of the way our brains react. Also, simply trying to suppress pain might not be as effective as actively distracting oneself from it.

A study by Cioffi and Holloway supports this, showing people felt more pain when they just tried to suppress it compared to when they distracted themselves.

People often try to control their moods, especially negative ones. While there is evidence that they can exert some control over their moods when asked, success in this area is often limited.

The Ironic Process Theory proposes that failures in mood control can be attributed to ironic processes.

When cognitive loads, like mental stress or distractions, are introduced while trying to control a mood, it may result in the enhancement of the opposite mood.

In a study by Wegner et al. (1993), participants were asked to recall either sad or happy life events and to either attempt to maintain, suppress, or just let their mood be without any specific instruction.

The findings indicated that mood control attempts, when combined with cognitive distractions, might intensify the opposing mood.

Additional research into relaxation techniques found similar ironic effects. When subjects attempted relaxation under conditions of cognitive load or stress, relaxation attempts could increase anxiety indicators like skin conductance level (SCL). This suggests that trying to relax under stressful conditions might ironically increase stress levels (Wegner, Broome, and Blumberg, 1993).

These findings might shed light on why individuals with anxiety disorders, who often possess a heightened motivation to avoid anxious states, continuously experience anxiety. Their frequent attempts at controlling their anxiety, especially under stress, could perpetuate their anxious states due to ironic processes.

Ansfield, M. E., Wegner, D. M., & Bowser, R. (1996). Ironic effects of sleep urgency .  Behaviour Research and Therapy ,  34 (7), 523-531.

Wegner, D. M., Erber, R., & Zanakos, S. (1993). Ironic processes in the mental control of mood and mood-related thought .  Journal of Personality and Social Psychology ,  65 (6), 1093.

Wegner, D. M., Schneider, D. J., Carter, S. R., & White, T. L. (1987). Paradoxical effects of thought suppression.  Journal of Personality and Social Psychology ,  53 (1), 5.

Wegner, D. M. (1994). Ironic processes of mental control.   Psychological Review ,  101 (1), 34.

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Research the White Paper

Researching the white paper:.

The process of researching and composing a white paper shares some similarities with the kind of research and writing one does for a high school or college research paper. What’s important for writers of white papers to grasp, however, is how much this genre differs from a research paper.  First, the author of a white paper already recognizes that there is a problem to be solved, a decision to be made, and the job of the author is to provide readers with substantive information to help them make some kind of decision--which may include a decision to do more research because major gaps remain. 

Thus, a white paper author would not “brainstorm” a topic. Instead, the white paper author would get busy figuring out how the problem is defined by those who are experiencing it as a problem. Typically that research begins in popular culture--social media, surveys, interviews, newspapers. Once the author has a handle on how the problem is being defined and experienced, its history and its impact, what people in the trenches believe might be the best or worst ways of addressing it, the author then will turn to academic scholarship as well as “grey” literature (more about that later).  Unlike a school research paper, the author does not set out to argue for or against a particular position, and then devote the majority of effort to finding sources to support the selected position.  Instead, the author sets out in good faith to do as much fact-finding as possible, and thus research is likely to present multiple, conflicting, and overlapping perspectives. When people research out of a genuine desire to understand and solve a problem, they listen to every source that may offer helpful information. They will thus have to do much more analysis, synthesis, and sorting of that information, which will often not fall neatly into a “pro” or “con” camp:  Solution A may, for example, solve one part of the problem but exacerbate another part of the problem. Solution C may sound like what everyone wants, but what if it’s built on a set of data that have been criticized by another reliable source?  And so it goes. 

For example, if you are trying to write a white paper on the opioid crisis, you may focus on the value of  providing free, sterilized needles--which do indeed reduce disease, and also provide an opportunity for the health care provider distributing them to offer addiction treatment to the user. However, the free needles are sometimes discarded on the ground, posing a danger to others; or they may be shared; or they may encourage more drug usage. All of those things can be true at once; a reader will want to know about all of these considerations in order to make an informed decision. That is the challenging job of the white paper author.     
 The research you do for your white paper will require that you identify a specific problem, seek popular culture sources to help define the problem, its history, its significance and impact for people affected by it.  You will then delve into academic and grey literature to learn about the way scholars and others with professional expertise answer these same questions. In this way, you will create creating a layered, complex portrait that provides readers with a substantive exploration useful for deliberating and decision-making. You will also likely need to find or create images, including tables, figures, illustrations or photographs, and you will document all of your sources. 

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• Last Updated: Sep 12, 2024 3:12 PM
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