Repression as the Monitoring and Censoring of Images: An Empirical Study

Abstract

The results of the present research show, first, that repressers' waking images are less vivid than sensitizers' waking images. They show, also, that hypnosis increases the vividness of repressers' images, but not the vividness of sensitizers' images. Such results were predicted by the theory of cognitive-state monitoring and its corollary, that wakeful image-monitoring plays a role in repressing potentially traumatic images.