Effective social interaction requires that people often try to influence their own minds. Mental control is a term for such self-regulation of mental states. People engage in mental control when they try to stop thinking about something, when they attempt to avoid unwanted or inappropriate emotions or desires, and when they try to create such states as well. The goal of this project is to test and refine a theory of ironic processes of mental control. According to this theory, any attempt to control the mind introduces both an operating process that promotes the intended change and an ironic process that tends to counteract this change. The operating process requires greater cognitive capacity than the ironic process, so mental control only works as intended when people have sufficient cognitive capacity. When they are distracted or under a stress that introduces cognitive load, their attempts to control their minds will regularly yield precisely the ironic opposite of what they intend. This idea is applied here to several domains of mental control with both personal and social consequences: The control of arousal, pain, depression, prejudice, and self-esteem. For each of these domains, studies are planned to examine what happens when people try to exert control over their minds with or without the presence of distracting cognitive loads.
The specific aims of the project include (1) testing the generality of the theory across these various domains, and (2) refining the theory through studies designed to examine the limiting conditions for ironic effects. If the proposed research is conducted, it should have several key implications for mental health. Ironic processes of mental control may be implicated in the etiology of psychological disorders such as depression, anxiety, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and sleep disorders, and may also underlie social interactional problems that arise from errors in the control of socially inappropriate behavior.
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