Continuous monitoring of affective-autonomic response dissociation in repressers during negative emotional stimulation

PERSONALITY INDIVIDUAL

PERGAMON

AND DIFFERENCES

Personality and Individual Differences 25 (1998) 69-84

Continuous monitoring of affective-autonomic response dissociation in repressors during negative emotional stimulation Jos F. Brosschot”*, Erick Janssenb “Depurtment of’Clinical Psychology, Unirersiteit van Amsterdam, Roetersstraat 15,1018 WB, Amsterdam, The Netherlands hKin.uJ!.Institute,fbr Research in Ses. Gender and Reproduction, Indiana University, Bloomingdon, IN 47405-2501, U.S.A.

Received 24 September 1997

Abstract Earlier studies of repressors’ low affective but high autonomic stress responses could not rule out the possibility that self-reported low affect was a defensive post-stressor construction. In the present study affective-autonomic dissociation was continuously assessed during three negative emotional movie excerpts. Repressors had higher dissociation scores (high skin conductance but low subjective tenseness, monitored continuously) than non-repressors. The finding that repressive affective-autonomic dissociation actually occurs during emotion induction itself is discussed in terms of a systems theory of self-regulation and health. Affective-autonomic response dissociation could be predicted by repression measured by the Defense Mechanism Inventory as well as by the, more conventional, combination of Marlowe Crowne-defensiveness and trait anxiety. c, 1998 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved. Kc,!.IIYJIY/.K continuous affective-autonomic response dissociation; repressor coping style: psychological defense: negative emotions

1. Introduction

A growing number of studies have indicated an association between repression of negative emotions and high risk for a variety of somatic health problems, including hypertension, cardiovascular disease, cancer and asthma (Julius et al., 1986; Pennebaker et al., 1987; Gross, 1989; Parker et al., 1989; Esterling et al., 1990; Larson and Chastain, 1990; Schwartz, 1990; Weiner, 1991; Olff et al., 1995; Scheier and Bridges, 1995). Most explanations for this risk share the idea that in repressors, affective responses to stressors are dissociated from physiological responses. According to Schwartz’ self-regulation theory of health (Schwartz, 1990), humans use various sources of feedback to organize their adaptive responses to environmental challenges. Autonomic responses to threat are important sources of such feedback. When cognitive processing of the threatening aspects of

*Corresponding

author.

SOl91-8869/98 $19.00 (‘. 1998 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved. PII: SO I9 i-8869(98)00056-7

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a situation is reduced, as is the case in repression, autonomic responses will not be adequately interpreted as signals of psychological danger. This under-utilisation of threat-induced bodily feedback will be reflected in dissociation between affective and autonomic responses. As for repressors, the prevailing view is that they fail in cognitive or behavioral coping with stressors, due to a persistent neglect of threat-related autonomic signals. As a consequence, their autonomic responses may not only persist, but may even increase in strength (Schwartz, 1990). Indeed, findings of a large number of studies suggest that enhanced autonomic tonus or increased autonomic stressreactivity are characteristics of a repressive coping style (Hokanson and Shelter, 1961; Hokanson and Burgess, 1962; Lazarus and Alfert, 1964; Baker and Schaie, 1969; Houston and Holmes, 1974; Weinberger et al., 1979; Gudjonsson, 1981; Asendorpf and Scherer, 1983; Lane and Schwartz, 1987; Pennebaker et al., 1987; Houston et al., 1989; Warrenburg et al., 1989; Godaert et al., 1991; Lai and Linden, 1992; Newton and Contrada, 1992; Muris et al., 1993; Olff et al., 1995). When manifested frequently or chronically, dissociation of affective and autonomic response may involve patterns of autonomic activity that lead to somatic pathology, which may explain the higher risk for disease found in repressors. Apart from object$able disease processes, affective-autonomic response dissociation may also cause or amplify self-reported somatic illness. Affective-autonomic response dissociation can lead to a surplus of uninterpreted autonomic information under conditions of stress. This information is typically nonspecific in nature and therefore highly prone to misattribution. It has been shown that autonomic arousal without an obvious origin is not appraised as affectively neutral, but rather as generally aversive (Zimbardo et al., 1993) and is easily attributed to somatic symptoms (Pennebaker, 1982). Thus, a surplus of uninterpreted somatic information due to repression of negative affect may lead to an over-reporting of somatic complaints. In contrast to the mechanism proposed for objectifiable disease, repressors’ autonomic patterns do not need to deviate from normal to cause subjective complaints. In its extreme form, this mechanism may help to understand somatization and provide a contemporary alternative for the traditional psychodynamic notion of somatization as a defense mechanism (Stekel, 1943). To date, four studies have yielded some initial evidence for the idea that repressors indeed show a high dissociation of affective and autonomic responses to stressors (Weinberger et al., 1979; Gudjonsson, 1981; Asendorpf and Scherer, 1983; Newton and Contrada, 1992). In these four studies, repressors had lower emotional responses to threat than non-repressors, while their levels of autonomic responses were not different from, or even higher than, responses of non-repressors. The autonomic measures used in these studies were increases in electrodermal responses (Gudjonsson, 1981), cardiovascular measurements (Asendorpf and Scherer, 1983; Newton and Contrada, 1992) or both (Weinberger et al., 1979). Repressors were psychometrically defined as high defensive but low trait anxious. It is somewhat surprising that, after the initial study in the 1970’s (Weinberger et al., 1979), only a few other studies have tested affective-autonomic response dissociation in repressors. Affective-autonomic response dissociation is the biological/behavioral analogue of the method typically used to operationalize repression, that is, by defining repressors as high defensive and low anxious. Experimental demonstrations of dissociation between affect and physiology in various emotional situations can yield important validation for this popular method to measure repression. Although the results of these four studies generally support the interpretation of the repressor coping style, they leave some important questions unanswered, which we address in the present study.

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A first question is how fast, after confrontation with a stressor, does an affective-autonomic response dissociation occur in repressors? Exploration of this temporal aspect of the relationship may reveal valuable information on how “automatic” this repressive dissociation is, or how much cognitive elaboration it seems to involve. In the four studies (Weinberger et al., 1979; Gudjonsson, 1981; Asendorpf and Scherer, 1983; Newton and Contrada, 1992) affect was measured after the stressor or after a set of stressful stimuli had been presented. Clearly, this leaves the possibility that the affective responses were not dissociated from the autonomic responses during the stressor itself, but that flattened affective responses were constructed afterwards. One reason to doubt the presence of affective-autonomic response dissociation during stress is that other indicators of affective expression measured during the stressor were not dissociated from autonomic responses (Weinberger et al., 1979; Asendorpf and Scherer, 1983). For example, reaction time, verbal interference (Weinberger et al., 1979) and facial activity (Asendorpf and Scherer, 1983) during the presentation of threatening sentences all showed patterns that were quite similar to the patterns of simultaneously measured autonomic reactions. Hence, it is not clear whether dissociation between autonomic responses and affect verbalization is a relatively “late” phenomenon, which is only present in the verbal report afterwards, or whether it is a relatively “early” phenomenon, appearing immediately after the initial appraisal of stress. The latter would be consistent with the selfregulation theory of repression and health outlined above (Schwartz, 1990), which states that repressive response dissociation causes under-utilisation of affective feedback. It can be argued that the more extensive and automatic this dissociation is, or the less cognitive elaboration is involved and the more synchronous high autonomic and low affective responses are, the more serious the effects of under-utilisation of affective feedback on health may become. Thus, affectiveautonomic response dissociation during stress would provide further support for the self-regulation theory of repression and health (Schwartz, 1990). A second question pertains to the method used to index repression. Like most contemporary approaches to repression, repressors were defined as individuals with high defensiveness scores on the Marlowe-Crowne Social Desirability Scale (MC) (Crowne and Marlowe, 1960) along with low trait anxiety (TA) scores. According to this “MC/TA-method”, “repressors” (REP) are distinguished from so-called “truly low anxious” (TLA), which are low anxious subjects who also score low on MC-defensiveness, “defensive high anxious” (DHA) subjects, who score high on both scales, and “high anxious” (HA) subjects, who score high on trait anxiety and low on MCdefensiveness. At present this method appears to be broadly accepted in the psychological literature (e.g. Davis and Schwartz, 1987; Hansen and Hansen, 1988; Kinget al., 1990; Newton and Contrada, 1994; Bonanno et al., 1995). In most repressor studies, one quadrant is missing from the twodimensional space defined by the MC and trait anxiety. Since it is often difficult to find sufficient high-anxious individuals who also score high on the MC, the defensive high anxious (DHA) group is nearly always discarded. This has important implications for the interpretation of the results. Without a DHA group, it is impossible to rule out the possibility that the results of the repressor group can be explained solely by their high scores on the MC. In other words, the results found for repressors in most of the studies may pertain to general defensiveness, instead of repression as defined by Weinberger et al. (1979). Of the dissociation studies reported to date (Weinberger et al., 1979; Gudjonsson, 1981; Asendorpf and Scherer, 1983; Newton and Contrada, 1992), only one (Asendorpf and Scherer, 1983) included the fourth group. In this study the DHA group reacted intermediately with respect to anxiety and physiology but the differences with other groups were

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not statistically significant. Thus, strictly speaking, an alternative for the dissociation findings in terms of general defensiveness cannot as yet be ruled out. In this context it is relevant to note that the MC/TA method to define repression is based on two instruments that were not originally developed to measure repression. There is very little known about the relationship between the MC/TA method and other paper-and-pencil measures of repression. Moreover, although some of these other methods have shown satisfactory validity and reliability (e.g. Gleser and Ihilevich, 1969; Bond et al., 1983) no attempt has been made to study affective-autonomic response dissociation in repressors using these other methods. If other methods would corroborate the findings of studies using the MC/TA method, the existence of the phenomenon of repression-linked dissociation would be much more convincing. A third and final question pertains to the adequacy of the stimuli used to induce psychological distress. Three of the four dissociation studies used a somewhat uncommon type of stressor, i.e. the task to complete emotionally loaded sentences. It is not clear whether results with these stimuli can be easily generalized to other, more common conditions in emotion research, such as naturalistic stress situations (e.g. performance under harassment conditions or reactions to emotional films). Pictorial emotional material is well known for its capacity to activate emotional responses to a level comparable to responses in real-life situations (Lang et al., 1993). In the present study, we attempted to extend the approach taken in earlier studies of affectiveautonomic response dissociation in repressors, by combining their strengths with some additional modifications. The main question was whether repressors, as compared to non-repressors, have higher affective-autonomic response dissociation during a stressor. Negative affect was induced by three emotional film excerpts. Both affective (tenseness) and autonomic responses (skin conductance level, SCL) were measured continuously during the emotional stimulation. An index for dissociation between these two continuous measures was individually calculated and compared between repressors and non-repressors. An additional advantage of this method is that it enables within-subject analysis. We included high DHA subjects in the non-repressor group. In addition to the selection of repressors using the MC-defensiveness scale and trait anxiety, we administered the Defense Mechanism Inventory (DMI, Gleser and Ihilevich, 1969). Dissociation was expected to be higher for repressors than for non-repressors and to be positively correlated with repression as measured by the DMI.

2. Method 2. I. Subjects Sixty-six subjects participated in the experiment. All subjects were undergraduate psychology students and received either course credit or a small amount of money for their participation. The subjects were recruited from a large pool (639) of undergraduates, to whom the tests were administered 2months before the experiment took place. Subjects who scored in the upper and lower thirds of the Marlowe-Crowne scale (MC; Crowne and Marlowe, 1960) and the Spielberger Trait Anxiety Inventory (STAI; Van der Ploeg et al., 1979) were asked to participate. In order to obtain a sufficient number of high DHA subjects, a double enrolment took place in the same pool.

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The age of the selected subjects ranged from 18 to 42years (mean=22,2years); female, 19 were male.

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47 subjects were

2.2. Repression Repression was measured using two methods. The first method (Weinberger et al., 1979) divided individuals according to their MC-defensiveness scores and trait anxiety (TA) on the STAI (Van der Ploeg et al., 1979) We used a 1Citem version of the MC (Hermans, 1967). The MC and STAI were administered for a second time before the experiment and these scores were used to check the selection made earlier. Like Weinberger and colleagues, we used the medians of both scales to split the subject groups. On the second test administration, the scores of 18 subjects were equal to the median of at least one of the two scales and could therefore not be assigned to one of the four groups. The final groups consisted of: repressors (REP; high MC/low TA, n = 15); defensive high anxious (DHA; high MC/high TA, II = 15); truly low-anxious (TLA; low MC/low TA, n = 11); and high-anxious (HA; low MC/High TA, n= 10). For several subjects some data were lost, due to technical problems. Unfortunately, this resulted in insufficient data for analysis for the high- and low anxious groups. Therefore, for most analyses we chose to compare the repressors with the three groups of non-repressors taken together. As a second method to define repression, we used the Defense Mechanism Inventory (DMI; Gleser and Ihilevich, 1969). The version used consists of five brief stories about conflict areas, which are followed by questions regarding the subject’s actual behaviour, fantasized behaviour, thoughts and feelings in the situations described. The subjects’ responses to these vignettes are believed to reflect five defense mechanisms: (1) turning against a real or presumed external object (TAO); (2) projection (PRO); (3) principalization (PRN), which involves invoking a mechanism that “splits off” affect from content and represses the former (e.g. isolation, intellectualization and rationalization); (4) turning aggression towards self (TAS) and (5) reversal (REV), including denial and reaction formation. According to Cramer (1988) the DMI has reasonably high validity and reliability. We administered a version using Likert scales, to avoid the intended interdependence of the scales that has been found in the original forced-choice version (Gleser and Ihilevich, 1969). The Likert scales were 5-point scales (certainly/probably/perhaps/probably not/certainly not). A previous study showed that the reliability of the scales is not affected by this modification (Olff et al., 1993). In the present sample, Cronbach’s alphas ranged from 0.74 to 0.82. For our purpose we used the composite measure, in which the “externalizing” defenses are subtracted from the “internalizing” defenses: DMZ-repression = [PRN + REV] -[TAO + PRO]. This scale is assumed to measure repression of affect (Juni, 1982; De Jong et al., 1994). Cronbach’s alpha of this composite scale equalled 0.86. 2.3. Film excerpts Three film excerpts were selected from a series of fearful film excerpts used in a study of Jansen and Frijda (Jansen and Frijda, 1994) which have proven to induce feelings of arousal, fear, aversion and anger and higher mean eye blink magnitudes, as compared to neutral film excerpts. The three excerpts used in the present study are:

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-“Caught”: This is an excerpt from the movie “Midnight Express”. The excerpt shows a man being caught at the Turkish customs with drugs hidden under his shirt (5.2 min). -“Drowned”: This excerpt is from “Don’t Look Now” and it shows a man dragging his drowned child out of the water and crying loudly over her dead body (2 min). -“Torture”: An excerpt from the film “Marathon Man”. In this excerpt a man is threatened with dental torture by a former Nazi executioner (5.3 min). The time noted between brackets is the duration of the intervals used for analysis, starting from the moment that, on average, subjects began to respond physiologically and affectively. The total duration of the film excerpts was 7.9, 3.9 and 7.1 min, respectively. The order of presentation of the film excerpts was varied over the subjects in a random fashion. 2.4. Skin conductance level Skin conductance (SCL) was recorded from the medial phalanges of the index- and middle finger of the non-dominant hand following a 20-min stabilization period. The recordings were taken by an alternating current voltage (30 Hz; kO.75) with Ag/AgCl electrodes (1 cm3 contact area) filled with 0.05 NaCl Unibase electrode paste (Fowles, 1980). The output of the resistance-to-voltage converter was integrated (time constant =300ms), adjusted to 0.2V/,& (linear within a skin resistance range of 5-200 kS2)and digitized (10 Hz). SCL was recorded continuously during baseline periods and film presentations. Although SCL is widely used as a physiological index of emotional state, it is a parameter of sympathetic activity and it therefore primarily reflects general arousal. However, the fragments were chosen on the basis of explicitness and homogeneousness of the emotions depicted. In a recent study of our group (ref/in prep), subjects rated their mood on a visual analogue scale before and after several emotional film fragments, including two excerpts used in the present study, “caught” and “drowned”. The excerpt “caught” induced increases in tenseness, irritation and a decrease in joy and “drowned” induced increases in anxiety, sadness, anger, tenseness and irritation and also a decrease in joy. Therefore, the SCL increases during the fragments can be safely interpreted as reflecting a negative and not positive emotional impact of these fragments. 2.5. Tenseness In order to continuously measure negative affect, subjects operated a mechanical lever which was attached to the side of the subject’s chair that matched the subject’s dominant hand (Janssen et al., 1994; Laan et al., 1993). The lever produced a continuous dc signal calibrated to indicate a l-10 scale. The subjects were instructed to use this lever to indicate how “tense” they felt during each film excerpt. The lever could be moved from 1 (“no tenseness”) to 10 (“extreme tenseness”). It was connected to a corresponding bar with 10 red light bulbs placed underneath the TV monitor so that subjects did not need to look away from the screen in order to monitor their level of tenseness. “Tenseness” was chosen because, according to the definition of the “repressor coping style”, the primary emotion to be repressed is anxiety. Moreover, “tension” is the name given to the anxiety scale of the most frequently used mood scales the POMS (McNair et al., 1971) and the item “tense” loads highest on this scale in factor analyses of the POMS.

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2.6. Affective-autonomic dissociation index

To control for baseline differences between subjects, SCLs were expressed as differences from the baseline that preceded each film excerpt. These scores were averaged over three-second intervals. Since our research question involves the relationship between affective responses and increases in SCL, and not decreases, dissociation was calculated as the within-subject correlation between all increases in SCL (as relative to their preceding SCLs) and the simultaneous change (either positive or negative) in tenseness. The resulting within-subject correlation was reversed, by subtracting it from 0. A positive value of the dissociation index means that a SCL increase is associated with a decrease in tenseness, whilst a negative value indicates that both variables increase at the same time. As the subjects differed in the number of times their SCL increased, the number of observations on which the within-subject dissociation index was based differed over the subjects and film excerpts. For each index, a reasonable number of increasing SCL increases per film excerpt had to be obtained. Therefore, subjects whose SCL increased only in five or less of the three-second intervals of a film excerpt were discarded for that particular excerpt. Preliminary analyses ascertained that the number of observations did not differ significantly between the repressors and non-repressors. 2.7. General procedure On arrival at the psychological laboratory, the subjects were asked to read and sign an informed consent. They were told that their skin conductance and mood were going to be measured during the presentation of excerpts from some popular thrillers. The subjects were not informed about the experimental hypotheses and their group membership was not revealed. The experiment was part of a larger series of cognitive psychology experiments, in which no further physiological measurements were taken. The subjects were seated in a comfortable chair and the SCL electrodes were attached. They filled in questionnaires for 20 min and were asked to relax during a subsequent 5-min adaptation period while listening to music of their own choice. After this period, they received an instruction on how to use the mechanical lever. This instruction was followed by a lmin rest period during which the SCL baseline measurement for the first film excerpt was taken. The three excerpts were shown with I-min baseline intervals in between, during which the subject was again presented with music. At the end of the session, the subjects were debriefed and were asked some evaluative questions, such as how they felt about the experiment and how familiar they were with the presented film excerpts. 2.8. Statistical analysis Mean SCL and tenseness over the film excerpts and groups were analyzed using ANOVA’s for repeated measures, with film excerpt being within-subject factor and group (repressors versus nonrepressors) being between-subjects factor. Dissociation indices were compared among groups for the three excerpts together and separately for each of the films. For these comparisons Student’s t-tests were performed, because a slightly different number of subjects had valid SCL’s and tenseness scores for each film. The relationship between DMI-repression and dissociation indices was analyzed using Pearson product-moment correlation coefficients. One-tailed probabilities were used, because we had clear directional hypotheses. Kolmogorov-Smirnov goodness-of-fit

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tests established that all dependent variables used in the analyses were normally distributed. Student-Newman-Keuls (SNK) tests for multiple comparisons were used to compare anxiety and defensiveness scores among the groups. 3. Results 3.1. De~nsj~eness and anxiety scores Mean scores of trait anxiety and MC-defensiveness are shown in Table 1. The four groups differed in trait anxiety: 43, 7) = 41.6, p -=c0.001; and MC-defensiveness: F(3, 47 = 52.5, p < 0.001. SNK tests revealed that the HA subjects and DHA subjects had higher trait anxiety scores than the repressors and the low anxious subjects and that the repressors and defensive high-anxious subjects had higher defensiveness scores than the high anxious subjects and low anxious subjects. As expected, the two groups that were used for the further analyses, the repressors and nonrepressors, also differed on trait anxiety (31.5 versus 40.5, t(49)= -4.43, p
Table 1 Trait anxiety and defensiveness

Repressors Defensive high anxious Truly low anxious High Anxious

n

Trait anxiety

Defensiveness

I.5 15 II 10

31.5” (3.7) 45.4b (5.4) 31.5” (2.8) 43.0b (4. I)

7.5’(1*3) 7.3” (1.2) 3Sd (0.7) 3.4d (1.1)

Values present means, with standard deviations between brackets. a.b.c.dForeach variable, cell means with different superscripts are significantly different from one another at the 0.05 level by Student-Newman-Keuis multiple range test.

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Movie Excerpts “CAUGHT

5.2

min

“TORTURE”

“DROWNED

2.0

5.3 min

min

Fig. 1. Tenseness and SCL for all subject during three film excerpts.

Table 2 Skin conductance level (XL) and tenseness for repressors and non-repressors for all film excerpts

Repressors (n = 14) Non-repressors (n = 30)

SCL US)

Tenseness***

0.56 (0.20) 0.05 (0.16)

0.9 (0.17) 1.9 (0.23)

Values present means, with standard brackets. ***p
errors between

toward a main effect of film excerpt, iF(2, 108)=2.70, p=O.O7. No additional interaction effects were found. Further exploration of this trend for film excerpts revealed that there was only a significant difference between the excerpts “caught” and “torture” (1.5 versus 1.9, t(H) = -2.3, p < 0.05). To investigate group differences in temporal patterns, analyses of variance for repeated measures were performed for each of the film excerpts. These analyses yielded no significant differences between the groups.

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DMI-repression was not significantly correlated with SCL, but there was a trend towards a negative correlation between DMI-repression and tenseness (r = - 0.22, p = 0.10). 3.3. Dissociation index: Repressors versus non-repressors The individual dissociation scores ( = correlation between SCL increases and tenseness) ranged from r=-0.81 to r=85 (mean r= - 0.02). This range of within-subject correlations between affective and physiological responses is comparable to ranges reported by others for pictorial stimuli (Lang et al., 1993). Again, no effects of appreciation or of prior experiences with the films on the dissociation indices were found. Table 3 shows that, while repressors had a pronounced dissociation index for the excerpts “caught” and “drowned”, it was only significantly so for the excerpt “drowned”: Mean r=0.44 versus 0.08, t(23) = 3.62, p < 0.00 1. This is further illustrated in Fig. 2, where the dissociation indices of all individual subjects in the analysis of the excerpt “DROWNED” are depicted, sorted by group, i.e. separately for the repressors and the three groups comprising the non-repressors. It should be emphasized here, that these indices were calculated on basis of the increases of SCL and changes of tenseness, in line with the main hypothesis of enhanced physiological reactivity that is not matched by similar enhancements of affective response. This means that the graphs in Fig. 1 do not necessarily correspond with the dissociation indices in Fig. 2. As can be seen in Fig. 2, all repressors except one, had a positive dissociation score, in contrast to most of the non-repressors. This means that repressor’s SCL increases were associated with relative decreases in simultaneously self-indicated tenseness. In addition, Fig. 2 shows that nearly half of the defensive/high-anxious subjects also had a positive dissociation index. Thus, these subjects’ dissociation score tended towards that of the repressors, which may indicate that the high or positive dissociation found for the excerpt “drowned” (see Table 3) is attributable to the high defensiveness score on the MC of both groups. The difference between repressors and non-repressors in the dissociation indices might be caused by differences in variances of SCL and tenseness. However, additional T-tests showed that these variances did not significantly differ between the groups for any of the different film excerpts.

Table 3 Dissociation indices for repressors and non-repressors for each film excerpt Dissociation index during

Repressors (n = 14) Non-repressors (n = 30)

all excerpts*

“caught”

“drowned”***

“torture”

0.10 (0.07) -0.10 (0.16)

- 0.04 (0.07) -0.16 (0.04)

0.44 (0.12) -0.08 (0.08)

-0.06 (0.11) - 0.01 (0.04)

Dissociation indices are calculated as correlation between SCL increase and tenseness, subtracted from zero. Values present means, with standard errors between brackets. *Significant difference between groups: p < 0.05, one-tailed. ***Significant difference between groups: p
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Repressors

Low Anxious

High Defensive/ High Anxious

High Anxious

Fig. 2. Dissociation indices (correlations between SCL increase and Tenseness, subtracted from zero) for each individual subject (every subject’s dissociation index is depicted as one bar), during film excerpt “drowned”, ordered by group and height.

3.4. dissociation index and air-repression

In line with our expectations, DMI-repression correlated positively with the dissociation indices for all excerpts, but again only significantly for the excerpt “drowned” (r=OSO, ~~0.01) (see Table 4). To explore this finding further, we divided the DMI-repression scale into its composite scales and correlated these scales with the dissociation indices. As is shown in Table 4, the “internalizing” DMI-REV scale (see Section 2) correlated positively with the dissociation index

Table 4 Pearson correlations between DMI-repression

and dissociation index for each emotional film excerpt

Correlation with dissociation index during all excerpts

“caught”

DMI-repression”

0.35**

0.13

Separate scales DMI-REV DMI-PRN DMI-TAO DMI-PRO

0.41** 0.17 -0.23 -0.17

0.31** 0.3i** 0.04 0.15

“drowned’ 0.50*** 0.44*** 0.27* -0.34** -0.31**

“torture” 0.03 0.22* 0.25** 0.10 0.17

“DMI-repression = ([PRN + REVj - [TAO f PRO]): REV = reversal, including deniaI and reaction formation; PRN = principalization, “splitting off’ affectfrom content; TAO = turning against a real or presumed external object (TAO); PRO = projection. *p-=0.10; +*p
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during the excerpts “caught” (Y= 0.3 1, p < 0.05) and “drowned” (Y=0.44, p < O.Ol), while a trend in the same direction was observed for “torture”. The other “internalizing” scale, DMI-PRN, correlated positively with the dissociation index during “caught” (v=O.32, p < 0.05) and “torture” (r = 0.25, p < 0.05) and showed a trend for “drowned”. Both “externalizing scales”, DMI-TAO and DMI-PRO, were correlated significantly (p c 0.05) and in the expected direction, with dissociation during “drowned” only (v = - 0.36 and r = - 0.3 1, respectively).

4. Discussion The present study showed evidence of affective-autonomic response dissociation during negative emotional stimulation in repressors. The results indicate that affective-autonomic response dissociation in so-called repressors can be detected not only after, but also during the presentation of a negative emotional stimulus. More precisely, we found more and higher negative within-subject correlations between increases in skin conductance level (SCL) and simultaneously measured feelings of tenseness, for repressors than for non-repressors, especially during one emotional film excerpt. This was an excerpt depicting a father who finds his drowned child. Affective-autonomic response dissociation in repressors appeared to be predicted by both Defense Mechanisms Inventory (DMI) and the MC/TA method. DMI-repression was related to higher response dissociation during the above-mentioned excerpts (the excerpt “DROWNED”), while the two “internalizing” scales of the DMI were related to higher response dissociation for all three stimuli. Thus, the present study provides evidence for the view that individuals who are psychometrically characterized as repressors, restrain, “split off’ or even reverse their feelings during negative emotional stimulation. The main finding of the present study, that is, that this dissociation of affect from autonomic activity takes place within the very three-second interval as the physiological response is measured, not only underscores conclusions from earlier studies using after-stress measures of affect (Weinberger et al., 1979; Gudjonsson, 1981; Asendorpf and Scherer, 1983; Newton and Contrada, 1992) but also expands upon these with new knowledge. First, it makes it questionable that affective-autonomic response dissociation which has been found previously in repressors is a relatively late, defensive post-hoc construction by the subjects. The fact that for nearly all repressors in our study negative correlations (= positive dissociation indices) were found between SCL increases and tenseness, implies that physiological reactions to a distressing excerpt are not merely associated with the absence of behavioral emotional responses, but with actual decreases in these responses. Moreover, these repression-related response dissociations (based upon autonomic increases and mood changes are not apparent in the picture for the whole group. In the present study, repressive response dissociation was demonstrated using two different methods of measuring repression, even though the two methods (like most methods used to assess psychological defense) converged only very weakly. Before discussing further the possible meaning of these findings, we will first address the weaknesses of the study. The loss of subjects due to missing data led us to perform the statistical analysis for repression defined by the MC/TA method with repressor group and a combination of the three non-repressor groups, unlike most other studies using this method. Although a statistical comparison of the four separate groups was not possible, the non-repressor groups, including the defensive high-anxious group, did not seem to differ markedly with regard to their dissociation indices (see Fig. 2).

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Moreover, in earlier studies using the MC/TA method the non-repressor groups are in fact often implicitly treated as one group. This is understandable, because for the sake of simplicity and for adequate comparison with studies using unidimensional measures of repression (for example the DMI), the hypotheses are best formulated in a binary way (i.e. in terms of repression versus nonrepression). The small number of repressors in the present study may have also deserved some consideration, were it not for the clear finding that all of these subjects, except one, showed a negative correlation between physiological and affective responses during at least one film presentation. Thus, low subject numbers did not prevent detection of the expected effects. Moreover, as mentioned above, the same, if not stronger effects were found for the measurement of repression using the DMI, in a correlational analysis. Thus, the clarity of the effect for the excerpt depicting a man finding his drowned child and the convergence of the findings using both methods suggests that the number of subjects in the MC analysis was large enough to demonstrate affectiveautonomic dissociation in repressors during the other film excerpts as well, had it been present. It is clear that a situation in which subjects are being explicitly instructed to focus their attention on their affective state is not readily generalizable to real-life conditions. On the other hand, the self-regulation theory outlined in the introduction (Schwartz, 1990) seems to imply that individuals have to monitor their emotional state very frequently to regulate their adaptive behaviour, in any case much more frequently than they report their state to other people. Thus, on the one hand our method may have induced a degree of affective self-reflection that is higher than the degree that is needed during normal social interaction. On the other hand the degree of affective focus that we induced is not necessarily higher than (and may even approach) the degree during the intense stream of private self-monitoring that provides feedback for adequate behavioral and cognitive adaptive reactions. Notwithstanding these concerns, it seems to be safe to conclude that we found evidence for a clear relationship between repression and affective-autonomic response dissociation during negative emotional stimulation. There can be several different reasons for the finding that individuals’ affective responses do not match their autonomic reactions, especially in repressors. For example, people may differ in general in the degree to which they tend to use external cues to interpret ambiguous internal sensations. But it is hard to see why repressors would be more focused on cues in the environment, instead of on their internal state, than others, if it was not for this specific characteristic that distinguishes them from others, i.e. their “repressiveness”. It is possible that repressors are more strongly directed at external (social) cues as a result of their general tendency to monitor possible psychosocial dangers to their self-esteem. They strive for a good impression, on themselves as well as on their social environment. To a high degree, repressors’ affective responses to the excerpts might have been a reflection of what they thought they should feel, rather than a reflection of their “true” internal state. Although the unequivocal emotional nature of the excerpts may have induced some subjects to move the tenseness-lever in line with what they thought they had to feel, instead of what they actually felt, the subjects did not show any sign of this in the post-experimental interview. Moreover, there is another argument against this interpretation. While it might explain a general lack of association (i.e. a dissociation index of zero), it can not explain the positive dissociation indices we found for nearly all repressors. Why should a tendency to use more external then internal cues lead repressors to pull the tenseness-lever down when his or her skin conductance goes up? Hence, another factor must be responsible for the higher dissociative responses found in

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repressors and this factor may very well be a defensive motivation to avoid awareness of negative affect. This view seems to be further sustained by the fact that the smallest repression-related dissociation (irrespective of the method that was used to measure repression) was found for the film excerpt in which the depicted threat is of a physical nature: the torture scene from “Marathon Man”. This suggests that threat to the self, or psychological rather than physical threat, triggers dissociative responses in repressors. This is consistent with the view that repressors are basically high trait anxious, but fail to recognize their affective responses and that their anxiety particularly involve threats to self-esteem (Weinberger, 1990). The finding that the torture excerpt yielded the least repressor-related dissociation may be viewed as a subtle validation for the repression measures, because the items of the scales used are intentionally restricted to psychosocial situations. The relationship between repression and affective-autonomic response dissociation was the strongest for the excerpt “drowned”. An explanation for this finding might be that this excerpt is the least remote from the personal experience of the average subject. The excerpt appeals to a general threat of loss and the accompanying sadness. It may be the easiest to identify with and is therefore at the same time the most sensitive for repressive cognitive reactions. The most important difference between the present dissociation study and the previous studies (Weinberger et al., 1979; Gudjonsson, 1981; Asendorpf and Scherer, 1983; Newton and Contrada, 1992) is the (successful) introduction of a new, continuous measurement of affect. The results show that this method may reveal dissociative responses which might be missed by methods using averaged measures. For example, repressors did not differ on the mean SCL and mean tenseness for the excerpt depicting a man finding his drowned child, while the dissociation index was significantly higher during this excerpt. Previous studies showed that other “on-line” or continuous measurements of stress reactivity, including vocal, facial and paralinguistic (Weinberger et al., 1979; Asendorpf and Scherer, 1983) converge with, instead of diverge from, autonomic reactivity. To our knowledge, the present study is the first to show dissociation between continuously measured psychological and physiological responses. Remarkably, the DMI-repression scale as well as the MC/TA method predicted affectiveautonomic dissociation. The DMI is far less frequently used than the MC/TA method and the present results show that this may be unjustified. Future research on the relationship between emotional processing and health may profit from the use of this method. Longer lasting stimuli may be used that allow for establishing the reliability of response dissociation. In general, studies of repression may fruitfully employ more than one method, to compare their scores and their predictive power with respect to health-related variables. Acknowledgements Preparation of this manuscript was supported by a postdoctoral Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences.

fellowship to J. F. B. from the

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