Repression is a putative psychological defense mechanism (Freud, 1957/1915) that inhibits anxiety-provoking, ego-threatening thoughts from entering consciousness. Debated for over a century, there has been little empirical evidence for the existence of repression, either as a trauma-specific or a general mechanism of forgetting (Erdelyi, 2006). An alternative is to measure differences between individuals’ repressive tendencies. The most studied approach by Weinberger et al. (1979) defines “repressors” as individuals who score high on self-report measures of defensiveness and low in measures of trait-anxiety. Thus, scores in two questionnaires are combined, trait-anxiety and trait-defensiveness. As a consequence, three additional groups of individuals are identified: “Low-anxious (LA)” individuals score low in trait-anxiety and low in trait-defensiveness. These are thought to be people with “truly” low anxiety since they do not respond defensively in questionnaires, unlike repressors. “High-anxious (HA)” individuals score low in defensiveness but high in trait-anxiety; and “defensive HA” individuals have high scores on both scales. A crucial finding is that repressors exhibit physiologically high levels of anxiety-related arousal despite their low self-reported anxiety (Weinberger et al., 1979; Broomfield and Turpin, 2005). Thus, by this operational definition, repressors have high levels of unacknowledged anxiety. Importantly, repressive coping style has been associated with deleterious effects on physical well-being, most consistently an increased risk for hypertension, cardiovascular diseases, and cancer (Mund and Mitte, 2012).

The motivation to maintain a positive self-view and avoid the experience of anxiety may drive repressors more than others to truncate, inhibit, or otherwise alter negative information processing. Indeed, repressors show biases against processing negative information. For example, compared to non-repressors, repressors recall fewer and less detailed negative autobiographical memories (e.g., Davis and Schwartz, 1987; Davis, 1990; Dickson et al., 2009; Geraerts et al., 2012). When directly instructed to inhibit processing of negative information, repressors are superior to non-repressors in (negative) thought suppression (Barnier et al., 2004; Geraerts et al., 2006, 2007). Repressors’ superior inhibition of negative information has also been shown in memory. For example, repressors had increased forgetting of negative self-related materials in list-method directed forgetting paradigms (Myers et al., 1998; Myers and Derakshan, 2004). They were also better able to perform the think/no-think task (Anderson and Green, 2001) than non-repressors, at least when they were given positive target memories to recall instead of negative ones (Hertel and McDaniel, 2010). Thus, active inhibition of negative, and especially, self-relevant memories may play a role in repressors’ selective forgetting of information in experimental contexts in which they are told to forget.

Repressors’ naturally occurring, uninstructed forgetting of laboratory materials has been more variable. Brosschot et al. (1997) found nothing remarkable about repressors’ free-recall and recognition of unpleasant (and pleasant) words. Similarly, Oldenburg et al. (2002) found neither implicit nor explicit memory biases against negative materials in repressors. Avero et al. (2003) found that individuals with an avoidant coping style (similar to the repressive coping style) had a more conservative response bias (β) but intact recognition sensitivity (d-prime) in recognition memory for negative words than other people. That is, repressors compared to non-repressors judged negative words (both target words and lure words) less often as “old items” in a recognition memory test, even though their ability to differentiate successfully between negative target words and negative lure words was intact. Focussing on self-related information rather than just valenced materials, Saunders et al. (2012) found in a series of studies that repressors are most susceptible to the mnemic neglect effect (Green and Sedikides, 2004; Green et al., 2008) compared to individuals with other coping styles. In mnemic neglect studies, participants are exposed to hypothetical scenarios that involve either themselves or a different person. These scenarios imply favorable or unfavorable personality traits (e.g., “I would keep secrets when asked to”) with different importance to people’s self-concept and different modifiability. In general, a “mnemic neglect” is reflected in reduced recall of situations that involve the self, and unfavorable, personally important, and unmodifiable characteristics. Repressors in Saunders et al. (2012) showed the strongest such mnemic neglect effects in a series of three experiments. Thus, personal involvement or significance, in addition to negative valence might be important to evoke spontaneous, i.e., unprovoked, memory biases in repressive individuals.

Hock, Krohne, and colleagues (Hock and Krohne, 2004; Krohne and Hock, 2008, 2011; Peters et al., 2012) define and measure repressive coping style using the Mainz Coping Inventory (MCI: Krohne and Egloff, 1989; Krohne et al., 2000). The MCI does not rely on the combination of defensiveness and anxiety but incorporates individual differences in information processing styles. MCI-repressors are thought to be motivated to control their experience of anxiety-related arousal and characterized by high dispositional threat avoidance. Their most extreme counterpart, sensitizers, are thought to be motivated to control potential dangers resulting from fearful situations. Therefore, MCI-based sensitizers are thought to be uncertainty-oriented and show high dispositional threat vigilance. Using this operationalization, repressors were found to show no biases against threat-related information in immediate retrieval (recognition memory for negative words/sentences or pictures), but those biases emerged only when testing was delayed by three days (Hock and Krohne, 2004; Krohne and Hock, 2008; see also Peters et al., 2012). This pattern has also been termed repressive discontinuity hypothesis indicating that repressors may have an early attentional bias toward threat but selectively retain non-threat and forget threat-information later on (Calvo and Eysenck, 2000; Caldwell and Newman, 2005; Derakshan et al., 2007; Paul et al., 2012). Krohne and Hock (2011) suggested based on the schema pointer plus tag model of Graesser and Bower (1990) that retrieval may co-vary with the level of atypicality of memories. According to this model, schema-incongruent information is better recalled at immediate testing and schema-congruent information is better recalled at delayed testing. If repressors have fewer threat-schemata than non-repressors, they should effectively retrieve threat-information immediately, but have reduced recall of (schema-incongruent) threat-related information at a delayed test. This is consistent with their findings (Hock and Krohne, 2004; Krohne and Hock, 2008; Peters et al., 2012).

If the main motivation of a repressive coping style is self-protection, one would expect to see decreased memory predominantly in tasks that require relating negative thoughts and memories to oneself (Myers and Derakshan, 2004; Saunders et al., 2012). Consequently, it seems likely that differences in personal involvement evoked by particular tasks may have contributed to the variability of the aforementioned results. For instance, the null findings of Brosschot et al. (1997) may have been due to participants simply rating stimuli for pleasantness and threat, a task that can be performed with minimal reference to oneself. Along this line, Fujiwara et al. (2008) also found no alterations in repressors’ recall or priming for negative information they had judged for valence. In contrast, within the same study, self-descriptiveness judgments critically mediated forgetting in repressors: non-repressors had better free-recall of negative self-descriptive words compared to negative non-self-descriptive words. In contrast, repressors showed no such free-recall benefit for negative self-descriptive information. Despite these group differences in free-recall, implicit memory (priming) for negative self-descriptive information was similar across groups. Thus, self-descriptiveness mediated free-recall (but not priming) biases against negative information even at an immediate test in our previous study. However, unknown is whether such self-serving rather than just valence-driven bias would become stronger over time.

Thus, we compared here whether repressive coping style mediated free-recall of words previously judged as self-descriptive at an immediate test (conceptual replication of Fujiwara et al., 2008), and at a delayed test. First, we expected to replicate our previous result and predicted that all groups but repressors should show a recall advantage of negative self-descriptive over negative information that was not self-descriptive in immediate test (experiment 1). Secondly, we expected that these immediate biases would become more pronounced with a delay (experiment 2). Thus, if schema-congruency drives delayed retrieval more so than immediate retrieval and repressors possess fewer negative self-schemata than non-repressors, repressors may retrieve even less negative self-descriptive information after a delay than immediately. Finally, we tested whether potential recall biases at delayed testing could be influenced by cueing all original materials prior to free-recall using a lexical decision task (experiment 3). Based on autobiographical memory work by Davis and others (Davis and Schwartz, 1987; Davis, 1990), who showed that repressors can be cued to retrieve negative autobiographical information that they did not report otherwise, we expected that repressors may not show conceivable biases against recalling negative self-descriptive information if they had been cued immediately prior to free-recall at the delayed test. We did not expect repressor-specific alterations of implicit memory in the lexical decision task after the delay. As we reported previously (Fujiwara et al., 2008), priming for negative self-relevant information had been intact in repressors at immediate test, and we did not expect this to change after a delay.

Repressors were the only group without a recall advantage for negative words they had previously judged as self-descriptive compared to words they had not endorsed as self-descriptive in experiment 1. This replicates our previous results (Fujiwara et al., 2008) in an independent sample, despite the fact that in the current setting we used three times as many words, a more gradual 4-point self-judgment scale and only a self-judgment task (but no valence-judgment task). The gradual 4-point scale was used to allow more nuanced self-descriptiveness judgments than simple yes/no answers. By having less extreme options available we intended to allow participants to be more realistic in their self-judgments and intended to test more graded self-descriptiveness effects on memory. While we had to combine the 4-point answers into two categories (self-descriptive and not-self-descriptive) to avoid excessive loss of data, this type of answering during the encoding task critically differs from the simple two options during encoding in Fujiwara et al. (2008) and could have altered participants’ experience during encoding in the current experiment. This suggests that although the effect is small, it appears to be real. However, counter to our second hypothesis, this relatively lowered recall for negative self-descriptive information within the repressor group did not become more pronounced in free-recall after a 2-day delay in experiment 2. Note also that repressors consistently had the highest positivity-judgment ratio in each study, but only in study 1 did we see their relatively reduced recall.

We had good reasons to expect that self-descriptiveness may increase repressors’ recall biases over a delay. Hock and Krohne (Hock and Krohne, 2004; Krohne and Hock, 2008; Peters et al., 2012) found that repressors recalled threat-related information less than non-repressor groups only after a delay. The definition of repressive coping style by Weinberger (1990; Weinberger et al., 1979) states that individuals with a repressive coping style are not just sensitive to any threat but particularly to threat directed at their positive self-view. Various findings (e.g., in thought suppression or directed forgetting paradigms; Myers et al., 1998; Barnier et al., 2004; Myers and Derakshan, 2004) also point to a particular vulnerability of repressors to self-related threat. Our own previous study (Fujiwara et al., 2008) also found no immediate recall reductions in repressors for negative information that had simply been judged with regard to valence, but recall reductions occurred if encountered in a self-relevant encoding task.

There are several possible explanations why we did not observe stronger self-serving memory biases over the delay in repressors. First, the “threat” imposed by our task can reasonably be conceived as mild although the results of experiment 1 imply that even this mild threat was sufficient to show differential retrieval patterns against negative self-descriptive information only in repressors. Saunders et al. (2012) found that repressors are more prone to self-serving recall distortions in mnemic neglect paradigms than non-repressors, especially those with high anxiety levels. An important difference in our procedure compared to mnemic neglect paradigms is that here participants self-selected information as self-descriptive or not-self-descriptive rather than being given hypothetical self-view threatening feedback by the experimenter. Thus, it is possible that in our study, a motivation to retrieve information that had previously been deemed self-diagnostic superseded any potential self-protective biases in memory, and perhaps even more so after the delay. Secondly, our 2-day delay was (for practical reasons) shorter by a day than that in Krohne and Hock’s work. Thus, perhaps we did not detect self-serving recall biases in repressors after the 2-day delay simply due to a truncated wait time before such biases would emerge. However, we believe it is unlikely that this difference caused the difference in results. Repressors after 2 days started to show a self-descriptiveness advantage in free-recall, especially for positive words but also (non-significantly so) for negative words. It is difficult to imagine how repressors would first show a self-serving bias in immediate recall, which became eliminated after a 2-day delay, and which would then be reinstated or even exaggerated after 3 days.

Fading affect bias, a phenomenon describing faster decay of information associated with negative emotional experiences compared to positive emotions over time (Walker and Skowronski, 2009) may also have contributed to our results. After 2 days, any potential threat experienced by repressors immediately post-judgment, leading to immediate relative recall reductions for negative self-descriptive words, may have dissipated. To our knowledge, the effects of a test delay on the self-descriptiveness effect as tested in experiment 2 and 3 have not been reported previously. However, self-reference effects in memory (superior memory for information evaluated with reference to oneself, compared to information evaluated with reference to someone else) tend to become stronger over time (Symons and Johnson, 1997). Differences in self-judgments (self-descriptive/not-self-descriptive) explained 10% of the variance in free-recall at immediate test in experiment 1. They explained 17% at the delayed test in experiment 2, pointing to an increase of the self-descriptiveness effect in memory over a delay. Thus, self-descriptiveness effects, regardless of valence, may have counteracted any potential increase in self-serving memory biases in repressors over time. Results of experiment 3 can be interpreted in favor of this explanation as well. While cueing diminished self-descriptiveness effects in free-recall in all non-repressor groups, mainly due to increasing recall of not-self-descriptive information, repressors were the only group retaining the self-descriptiveness effect after cueing. Perhaps, repressors more so than any of the other groups, had been reminded of information they had previously endorsed as pertaining to themselves. They could have then used this information to produce the most self-consistent recall pattern rather than a positively biased one.

In this context, the assessment of coping styles using the BIDR-SDE subscale in our studies may have played a critical role. The BIDR-SDE subscale measures private, overconfident, egoistic self-deception (Paulhus, 1991; Paulhus and John, 1998) rather than outward-directed conformism to social norms as assessed with the Marlowe–Crowne Social Desirability Scale (MCSDS; Crowne and Marlowe, 1964), which is more commonly used in the repressive coping style literature following Weinberger et al. (1979). Repressors need to convince themselves and not just others of their own invulnerability against anxiety (Weinberger et al., 1979; Weinberger, 1990). Thus, the SDE part of the BIDR seemed better suited to assess the repressive coping style than the MCSDS (see also Weinberger and Davidson, 1994; Ashley and Holtgraves, 2003). However, individuals with high BIDR-SDE scores are also characterized by mental rigidity. For example, they perseverate in performing erroneous behavior in the face of failure (Peterson et al., 2003). It appears possible then that our high BIDR-SDE repressors may have reinterpreted initially self-devaluing information in a more positive light over the delay and therefore might have been well able to retrieve it, especially so when cued with an innocuous priming task. Therefore, despite the normative ratings used to select the words in this study (Anderson, 1968), it is possible that some of the negative (unlikable) words indeed represented desirable characteristics to repressors, particularly after some deliberation during the delay.

This interpretation does not run counter to Hock and Krohne’s findings (Hock and Krohne, 2004; Krohne and Hock, 2008; Peters et al., 2012). Rather it suggests that when assessing coping styles in different ways, memories for valenced materials and self-related materials decay differently over time depending on how repressive coping style is measured and whether self-involvement is present. Avoidance of (anxiety-induced) arousal underlies repressive coping in the MCI. Hence, arousal-inducing information may not be consolidated to the same extent in (MCI-)repressors than in groups of non-repressors, which could result in decreased memory for such information over time. Conversely, when using the BIDR-SDE to assess the defensiveness dimension of Weinberger’s conceptualization of repressive coping, information inconsistent with an over-positive self-view may become reinterpreted over time and seems to remain accessible.

Future extensions of the current studies would need to incorporate both valence- and self-descriptiveness judgments to test our suggestions. As such, one should assess whether repressors indeed judge originally self-descriptive negative information in a more positive way following a delay. Furthermore, the experiments involved either individual or group testing settings. Even though this seemed to have only minor influences on the results, it would be optimal to keep the testing environment more consistent in future studies, e.g., by only testing participants individually. An important limitation in this field in general is the relatively arbitrary separation of coping style groups. This can be remedied by using substantially larger samples and a continuous measure of repressive coping (as suggested by Mendolia, 2002). Another way to select repressive individuals might be to assess physiological reactivity (e.g., after a stress induction task) in conjunction with self-report, as done in some previous studies (e.g., Coifman et al., 2007). Repressors selected this way would show normal to high physiological reactivity in conjunction with an under-reporting of the stress experience, which is at the core of Weinberger’s characterization of the repressive coping style.

In this set of studies, individuals with a repressive coping style showed selectively lowered immediate recall of negative self-descriptive information, but not after a 2-day delay. This result may seem to run counter to suggestions of repressors having an exaggerated bias against retrieving negative memories after a delay. However, we suggest that repressors, at least when assessed according to Weinberger’s classification scheme, may reinterpret initially negative self-relevant information in a more positive light after a delay, and therefore no longer experience the need to bias their recall at a delay.

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.