Cognitive Interference

Theories, Methods, and Findings

Irwin G. Sarason, Gregory R. Pierce, Barbara R. Sarason, Irwin G. Sarason, Gregory R. Pierce, Barbara R. Sarason

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317843887
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Clinical Psychology
• Index: Psychology

In this volume, the first synthesis of work on cognitive interference, leading researchers, theorists, and clinicians from around the world confront a number of important questions about intrusive thoughts and suggest a challenging agenda for the future.

PART
I

COGNITIVE INTERFERENCE
AND INFORMATION
PROCESSING

C H A P T E R
1

THE CONTENTS OF THOUGHTS: INTERFERENCE AS THE DOWNSIDE OF ADAPTIVE NORMAL MECHANISMS IN THOUGHT FLOW

Eric Klinger

University of Minnesota

Cognitive interference takes many forms: attentional bias and distraction, memory lapses of various kinds, and several different kinds of intrusive or otherwise objectionable thoughts or thought patterns. This chapter discusses the last of these, the anomalies of thought content that are variously labeled mindwandering, daydreaming, worry, rumination, and obsessive thought.

These all have much in common. Much of the time they make adaptive—indeed, indispensable—contributions to living. At other times, they intrude on consciousness in ways that interfere with task performance and social relationships (Sarason, Sarason, Keefe, Hayes, & Shearin, 1986). The author regards them as consequences of the normal mechanisms that govern the flow of thought, albeit sometimes with self-destructive impact. This need not surprise us. Many pathways toward disease are laid down as protective processes that may sometimes go awry, as with fevers that protect but may get out of hand, or immune responses that protect but may begin to devastate the host. To begin with, then, the chapter reviews the normal mechanisms that govern thought flow and then examines the ways in which the thought patterns they engender come to take on troublesome forms.

NORMAL MECHANISMS OF SHIFTS IN THOUGHT CONTENT

Human thought normally shifts focus at a high rate, at least in the case of Minnesota students. Judging from thought-sampling studies with subjects trained to estimate the duration of their thoughts, the median length of time during which thought content remains on the same specific topic is about 5 seconds, with a mean of about 14 seconds (Klinger, 1978). This indicates that on average people shift thought content about 4,000 times per 16-hour day; or, putting it another way, engage in about 4,000 distinct thoughts a day.

Therefore, rapidly shifting thought content is the human norm. It becomes troublesome and can be considered to be interference when the content to which it shifts gets in the way of the individual’s immediate goals. For example, if the person is trying to accomplish some task from which thought content keeps drifting away, and if that interferes with completing the task in a timely and effective manner, then the individual is likely to declare him or herself to be in a state of one or more of the following: mindwandering, preoccupation, worry, or inability to concentrate. If thought keeps shifting to images that the individual finds disturbing, such as particular violent or unacceptable sexual images, s/he may ponder the possibility of becoming mentally ill or may simply become self-condemnatory; and if he or she consults a psychodiagnostician, a case of obsessive-compulsive disorder may be diagnosed. Yet, in most such instances, the problem will turn out to be not a defect in the thought-shifting mechanism itself but a conflict between the conditions that govern the normal functioning of that mechanism and the individual’s self-stated goals and possibly self-concept.

A Model of the Thought-Shifting Mechanism

In a nutshell, the model used here asserts that thought content shifts when an individual encounters a cue that arouses emotion because of its association with one of the individual’s current concerns. The thought so triggered is likely to pertain to the respective concern. There are a number of qualifications to this generalization, but let us first explicate the core of the model.

A root assumption of this model is that animal life—including human life—consists of a series of goal pursuits. The term current concern (Klinger, 1971, 1975, 1977, 1987a) denotes a construct that refers to the latent state of an organism between the two time points of commitment to striving for a particular goal and either goal attainment or disengagement from that goal. The construct by itself does not refer to conscious content; although concerns are presumed to exert extensive influence on attention, recall, thought content, and action, the construct is different from—is presumed to underlie—these effects. This view posits a separate concern corresponding to each of a person’s current goal pursuits. The goal in question may be as short- or long-term, as narrow or broad, and as trivial or lofty as the person may conceive of it, whether buying a new shirt, making new friends, winning an election, or attaining salvation.

A major property of a current concern is sensitization to cues associated with the goal or with the means for attaining it. This sensitization takes the form of emotional reactivity to those cues, accompanied by cognitive and often motor responses directed at advancing toward the goal. If the situation permits the person to take action toward the goal without unacceptable costs, the response will include such action. For example, if the goal is to attend a sold-out concert and the cue is an acquaintance who wishes to sell a ticket at a reasonable price, one is likely to buy the ticket on the spot. If the situation permits cognitive work aimed at later action toward the goal, this becomes part of the response. For example, if the cue is an acquaintance who intends to use the ticket, one may briefly ponder how to induce him to sell it. If the situation permits neither kind of operant response, the response remains respondent—simply spontaneous thought in reaction to the cue, without intended purpose. Such spontaneous responses are often dubbed “daydreaming.” For example, the conversation comes around to the concert, no one there has a ticket, and one imagines trying to find a ticket just before the performance, or enviously imagines the crowd having a good time at the concert. In other words, emotionally arousing cues instigate goal-related responses, which may be restricted to spontaneous, apparently idle cognitive responses in the absence of acceptable opportunities to accomplish more.

The existence of emotional reactivity to cues associated with goal pursuits does not mean a full-blown emotional reaction to each cue that might be so associated. Rather, there are several levels at which cues are screened. At the lowest level, the individual processes gross features of a cue and, if an association with a goal pursuit exists, responds with a purely central, nonconscious protoemotional response. This response ushers in further cognitive processing which may confirm or disconfirm the relevance of the cue. In the case of disconfirmation, processing ends, whereas in the case of confirmation, processing proceeds further or is channeled into action, depending on the extent of cognitive closure about the cue and on the situation. At various points in this process, the cue may still be dismissed, terminating processing; or, as the meaning of the cue becomes clearer, the protoemotional process may gradually recruit other components of emotional response—glandular (e.g., adrenal, dermal), effector (e.g., facial, postural), and conscious components, including associated thought content.

The cues may be either external, such as speech, writing, or nonverbal events, or they may be internal, such as features of the ongoing stream of thought. “Thought” throughout this chapter includes mental imagery, whether verbal or not.

Qualifications to the Model

There are at least two kinds of qualifications to these generalizations. First, because individuals often encounter cues while engaged in some other activity, processing the cue sets up a conflict with the processing required by the already existing activity. Ongoing activity is accompanied by, for competing responses, reduced access to consciousness, to effectors, and probably to other resources. That is, competing activity, including conscious attention to something other than the ongoing activity, is to some extent inhibited. The inhibition is far from total, but it does raise the threshold for whatever criteria a competing response process must surmount to gain access. Therefore, concern-related, emotionally arousing cues may be processed without entering consciousness unless they pass certain elevated criteria for interrupting the ongoing stream.

A second qualification arises from the observation that emotionally arousing cues may produce conscious mental content even when they are not associated with a current concern. The cues may elicit hard-wired emotional responses, or they may elicit conditioned emotional responses that have not yet been extinguished. In most instances, however, emotional responses reflect current concerns—joy that goal pursuits are going well, fear when they are threatened, anger when they are first blocked, and disappointment, sadness, depression, or grief after they are clearly lost.

Implications for Shifts in Mental Content. This delineated model suggests both a mechanism for normal shifts in thought content and the variables that might occasion shifts that are experienced as interference. When a person is trying to work, for instance, the model would predict difficulty in keeping one’s mind on the job in situations rich in cues for one’s other current concerns, or when one is in the grip of an important current concern that produces powerful emotional responses to a wide range of cues, including those in one’s own thought stream, but with a different goal from the goal of the task at hand. With this model, it is easy to see why concentrating on work is difficult while in love, in grief, or anticipating an imminent vacation. Later sections of this chapter explore these implications further.

Evidence for the Model

Evidence That Concern-Related Cues Elicit Conscious Content. Initial investigations of this model employed dichotic listening to two simultaneous 15-minute narratives, one to each ear, both of them taken from the same literary work. At intervals, the narratives were modified by inserting words that would presumably be associated with one of the subject’s current concerns in one channel and synchronously the opposite narrative was modified to allude to another individual’s concern, designated here as a nonconcern. These conditions were, of course, balanced with respect to side. Subjects used a toggle switch to signal the channel to which they were currently listening. A few seconds after each of these modified passages (embedding sites), the tape stopped with a signal tone, at which point subjects reported and rated last thoughts and also reported the last segments of the tape they could recall hearing. This provided information regarding attentional direction, recall, and thought content. Methods for assessing concerns included interviews at first and subsequently questionnaires (Klinger, 1987b), including currently the Motivational Structure Questionnaire (Cox & Klinger, 1988; Klinger & Kroll-Mensing, 1995).

The effects of conditions were quite powerful (Klinger, 1978). Subjects spent significantly more time listening to passages associated with their concerns, recalled those passages much more often, and had thought content that (by ratings of blind judges) was much more often related to them than to the nonconcern passages opposite them. Judges found hardly any resemblance of thoughts to passages that subjects had not yet heard, indicating that the cuing effect of concern-related stimuli accounted for the differences. Furthermore, when subjects were exposed to tapes created for other subjects, the embedded passages had no detectable effect, indicating that embedded text as such could not account for the effects.

To investigate whether this responsivity to concern-related cues required a conscious cognitive process or was reasonably automatic, we conducted a sleep experiment (Hoelscher, Klinger, & Barta, 1981). Sleeping subjects received spoken words or brief phrases that related to concerns or nonconcerns, as assessed on a previous day. A few seconds later, they were awakened for a dream report. Subjects much more often reported dreams related to concern-related than to nonconcern-related cues. Again, a control rating of how much dreams resembled cues not yet heard found little resemblance, indicating that the concern-related cues were responsible for the effect. These results confirmed that the effects of concern-related cues on cognitive processing are substantially automatic. That is, they occurred in reaction to concern-related cues without the intercession of waking consciousness or of deliberate decision-making.

Other data link current concerns to electrodermal responses of the kind often identified as orienting responses; they suggest that responses to internally generated cues follow the pattern shown for external cues (Nikula, Klinger, & Lar-son-Gutman, 1993). When subjects were induced to listen to strings of three-word clusters, those that alluded to one of the subject’s current concerns evoked significantly more skin conductance responses than did those chosen to allude to a nonconcern. Furthermore, subjects thought-sampled just after a spontaneous skin conductance response—that is, a skin conductance response during a period without external cuing—were significantly more likely to report just having thought about a current concern than when they were thought-sampled during electrodermally inactive periods.

Evidence That Concer...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Part I: Cognitive Interference and Information Processing
• Part II: Cognitive Interference, Stress, and Performance
• Part III: Cognitive Interference and Clinical Problems
• Author Index
• Subject Index