ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2016
Reducing future fears by suppressing the brain mechanisms underlying episodic simulation.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2016. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 41 papers.
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Who cites it
41 citing papers in PubMed.
- The Impact of Unemployment Insurance Benefit Cuts on Mental Health: Evidence From Early Pandemic Program Expirations.Health economics · 2026Article
- Morality across time: Evidence for a moral asymmetry between episodic future thinking and autobiographical memory.Memory & cognition · 2026Article
- Learning from imagined experiences via an endogenous prediction error.Nature communications · 2025Article
- The effectiveness and adaptiveness of suppressing unwanted thoughts.Psychonomic bulletin & review · 2025Review
- Brain mechanisms underlying the inhibitory control of thought.Nature reviews. Neuroscience · 2025Review
- Impact of Media-Induced Uncertainty on Mental Health: Narrative-Based Perspective.JMIR mental health · 2025Article
- Neural correlates of suppressing and imagining future threat.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Inhibitory control in addictive behaviors: is there room for memory suppression?Frontiers in human neuroscience · 2025Article
- Prefrontally mediated inhibition of memory systems in dissociative amnesia.Psychological medicine · 2024Article
- Psychological flexibility and cognitive-affective processes in young adults' daily lives.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- Everything you ever wanted to know about the Think/No-Think task, but forgot to ask.Behavior research methods · 2024Article
- Reconsidering thought suppression and ironic processing: implications for clinical treatment of traumatic memories.Frontiers in psychology · 2024Article
- Neurocognitive Model of Schema-Congruent and -Incongruent Learning in Clinical Disorders: Application to Social Anxiety and Beyond.Perspectives on psychological science : a journal of the Association for Psychological Science · 2023Article
- Controlling intrusive thoughts of future fears under stress.Neurobiology of stress · 2023Article
- Improving mental health by training the suppression of unwanted thoughts.Science advances · 2023Article
- A mindful approach to controlling intrusive thoughts.Scientific reports · 2023Article
- Memory reactivation and suppression modulate integration of the semantic features of related memories in hippocampus.Cerebral cortex (New York, N.Y. : 1991) · 2023Article
- Reduced hippocampal-cortical connectivity during memory suppression predicts the ability to forget unwanted memories.Cerebral cortex (New York, N.Y. : 1991) · 2023Article
- Perspective-taking is associated with increased discriminability of affective states in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex.Social cognitive and affective neuroscience · 2022Article
- EEG evidence that morally relevant autobiographical memories can be suppressed.Cognitive, affective & behavioral neuroscience · 2022Article
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3 authors.
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Abstract
Imagining future events conveys adaptive benefits, yet recurrent simulations of feared situations may help to maintain anxiety. In two studies, we tested the hypothesis that people can attenuate future fears by suppressing anticipatory simulations of dreaded events. Participants repeatedly imagined upsetting episodes that they feared might happen to them and suppressed imaginings of other such events. Suppressing imagination engaged the right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, which modulated activation in the hippocampus and in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC). Consistent with the role of the vmPFC in providing access to details that are typical for an event, stronger inhibition of this region was associated with greater forgetting of such details. Suppression further hindered participants' ability to later freely envision suppressed episodes. Critically, it also reduced feelings of apprehensiveness about the feared scenario, and individuals who were particularly successful at down-regulating fears were also less trait-anxious. Attenuating apprehensiveness by suppressing simulations of feared events may thus be an effective coping strategy, suggesting that a deficiency in this mechanism could contribute to the development of anxiety.
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