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Abstract
The present study is an investigation of the relationship between irrational beliefs and thought suppression in predicting distress in cancer patients. While there is a significant amount of data supporting their role as vulnerability factors for distress, no attempts have been made so far to study the relationships between these two individual characteristics. Our results show that both irrational beliefs and thought suppression are related to distress, and that the impact of irrational beliefs on distress is completely mediated by thought suppression. Potential mechanisms and implications are discussed.
Key words: thought suppression, irrational beliefs, distress
The role of cognition in producing and influencing human emotional responses has long been established beyond shadow of a doubt, with numerous studies showing that what (cognitive contents) and how (cognitive strategies and processes) we think has a direct impact on what we feel (Lazarus, 1991; Lazarus & Smith, 1998). However, theoretical models differ with respect to the type of cognition they emphasize, some focusing on our representations of reality (inferences, descriptions, attributions) (Beck, 1979; Schachter & Singer, 1962), others on the appraisals/evaluations of representations (how they are processed in terms of their relevance for personal well-being) (Ellis, 1994; Lazarus & Smith, 1998), and others on unconscious information processing (David & Szentagotai, 2006). While the combination of these approaches offers a comprehensive picture of our emotional life, recent research data points to the crucial role of evaluative beliefs in emotion formation, being widely accepted that as long as representations remain unevaluated, they are insufficient to produce emotions (Lazarus, 1991; Lazarus & Smith, 1988). This approach makes it easy to understand why people react differently to the same event.
Rational versus irrational beliefs
Albert Ellis's (1962, 1994) concepts of rational and irrational beliefs (RBs and IBs) refer to such evaluative cognitions, which are considered to be important cognitive resilience/vulnerability factors. They can predict both how individuals emotionally react to stressful events, as well as their specific inferences, descriptions, attributions during these events (Dryden, Ferguson, & Clarck, 1989; Dryden, Ferguson, & Hilton, 1989; Dryden, Ferguson, & McTeague, 1989). While rational beliefs are pragmatic, logical, reality-based and flexible, irrational beliefs are non-pragmatic, in that they prevent people from achieving their goals, illogical, non-reality based and rigid.
There are four categories of...