ArticleJournal of experimental psychology. General2018
What doesn't kill you makes you stronger: Psychological trauma and its relationship to enhanced memory control.
Article in Journal of experimental psychology. General, 2018. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 24 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
24 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it, 85 citations in OpenAlex.
- Fifteen Years Controlling Unwanted Thoughts: A Systematic Review of the Thought Control Ability Questionnaire (TCAQ).Frontiers in psychology · 2019Pooled it
- Dissociable memory modulation mechanisms facilitate fear amnesia at different timescales.eLife · 2025Article
- The effectiveness and adaptiveness of suppressing unwanted thoughts.Psychonomic bulletin & review · 2025Review
- Slowdown vs. breakdown of memory recall by retrieval stopping.Memory & cognition · 2025Article
- Brain mechanisms underlying the inhibitory control of thought.Nature reviews. Neuroscience · 2025Review
- Trauma-analogue symptom variability predicted by inhibitory control and peritraumatic heart rate.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Dissociative experiences alter resting state functional connectivity after childhood abuse.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Plasticity of human resilience mechanisms.Science advances · 2025Article
- Everything you ever wanted to know about the Think/No-Think task, but forgot to ask.Behavior research methods · 2024Article
- Specificity and integration of meaning in self-defining memories of breast cancer survivors: clinical reflections to promote a narrative identity integration.Frontiers in psychology · 2024Article
- On the role of inhibition in suppression-induced forgetting.Scientific reports · 2023Article
- Inducing forgetting of unwanted memories through subliminal reactivation.Nature communications · 2022Article
- Task compliance predicts suppression-induced forgetting in a large sample.Scientific reports · 2021Article
- Losing Control: Sleep Deprivation Impairs the Suppression of Unwanted Thoughts.Clinical psychological science : a journal of the Association for Psychological Science · 2021Article
- Gender Matters: Nonlinear Relationships Between Heart Rate Variability and Depression and Positive Affect.Frontiers in neuroscience · 2021Article
- Neurophysiologic evidence for increased retrieval suppression among negative ruminators.Brain and behavior · 2020Article
- Stop Thinking: An Experience Sampling Study on Suppressing Distractive Thoughts at Work.Frontiers in psychology · 2020Article
- The Return of the Repressed: The Persistent and Problematic Claims of Long-Forgotten Trauma.Perspectives on psychological science : a journal of the Association for Psychological Science · 2019Review
- Review
- The forgotten part of memory.Nature · 2019Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
2 authors at 2 institutions in 2 countries.
Funding
Abstract
Control processes engaged in halting the automatic retrieval of unwanted memories have been shown to reduce the later recallability of the targets of suppression. Like other cognitive skills that benefit from practice, we hypothesized that memory control is similarly experience dependent, such that individuals with greater real-life experience at stopping retrieval would exhibit better inhibitory control over unwanted memories. Across two experiments, we found that college students reporting a greater history of trauma exhibited more suppression-induced forgetting of both negative and neutral memories than did those in a matched group who had reported experiencing little to no trauma. The association was especially evident on a test of suppression-induced forgetting involving independent retrieval cues that are designed to better isolate the effects of inhibitory control on memory. Participants reporting more trauma demonstrated greater generalized forgetting of suppressed material. These findings raise the possibility that, given proper training, individuals can learn to better manage intrusive experiences, and are broadly consistent with the view that moderate adversity can foster resilience later in life. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2018 APA, all rights reserved).
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.