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The Psychological Record, 2013, 63, 209218

COGNITIVE DEFUSION VERSUS THOUGHT DISTRACTION

IN THE MITIGATION OF LEARNED HELPLESSNESS

Nic Hooper

Middle East Technical University, Northern Cyprus Campus

Louise McHughUniversity College Dublin

Recent research suggests that attempting to avoid unwanted psychologicalevents is maladaptive. Contrastingly, cognitive defusion, which is anacceptance-based method for managing unwanted thoughts, may provide aplausible alternative. The current study was designed to compare defusion andexperiential avoidance as strategies for coping with unwanted thoughts duringa learned helplessness preparation. Before entering the learned helplessness

preparation, participants were provided with 1 of 3 instructions: defusion,experiential avoidance (via a thought distraction instruction), or control(i.e., no instruction). Directly after the learned helplessness preparation,participants were instructed to attempt a pen-and-paper maze task, wheretheir completion time was recorded. Results indicated that participants whoreceived the defusion instruction produced maze times that were significantlyshorter than the thought distraction and control groups. Results are discussedin terms of the efficacy of defusion instructions in the management of unwantedthoughts and the maladaptive nature of engaging in experiential avoidance.Key words: defusion, acceptance, thought distraction, learned helplessness

Over the past decade, increasing empirical support has emerged for acceptance andcommitment therapy (ACT; Hayes, Strosahl, & Wilson, 1999), a form of third-wavecognitive behavior psychotherapy. ACT suggests that the dominant verbal system withinwhich humans exist promulgates the message that undesirable psychological content (e.g.,negative thoughts, feelings, and sensations) is a barrier to effective living and that in orderto begin to live effectively, we must eliminate and/or change such content. For instance,advocates of positive thinking typically suggest that negative thoughts such as, I am notgood enough should be excised and that positive thoughts such as, I am perfect or Ican do anything that I put my mind to should replace them (Lightsey, 1994; Wood,

Perunovic, & Lee, 2009). However, research suggests that attempting to alter or avoidunwanted negative content can increase its presence (Deacon, Fawzy, Lickel, & Wolitzky-Taylor 2011; Hooper Saunders & McHugh 2010)


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210 HOOPER AND MCHUGH

language by teaching clients to distance themselves from their thoughts. More specically,cognitive defusion is the process of undermining the behavior regulatory functions andliteral believability of thoughts (Twohig, Masuda, Varra, & Hayes, 2005). ACT cliniciansencourage clients to defuse from their negative content by viewing their thoughts as justthoughts rather than considering them to have literal meaning (Healy et al., 2008).

Previous research on defusion has used Titcheners (1916) word-repetition exercise.The word-repetition exercise involves repeating a word until it loses its semantic meaning(Masuda, Hayes, Sackett, & Twohig, 2004). Masuda et al. (2004), in a series of single-casealternating treatment designs, compared three techniques in the management of unwantedthoughts: (a) defusion, (b) thought distraction, and (c) thought control. In the defusioncondition, participants were instructed to generate two self-relevant negative thoughts andreduce them to one word. For example, the thought I am a bad person was reducedsimply to bad. Subsequently, participants were required to repeat that word over a 30-speriod. The ndings indicated that the defusion instruction produced a signicant reductionin both the believability and the distress levels associated with the thought, compared toboth the thought distraction and thought control groups. In an extension of this work,

Masuda et al. (2009) investigated the impact of exercise length on associated distress andbelievability of the thought. Their ndings indicated that distress levels were reduced afterjust 3 to 10 s, and believability was reduced after 20 to 30 s.

Healy et al. (2008) investigated the impact of an alternative defusion technique onself-negative statements. Rather than using Titcheners (1916) word-repetition exercise,these researchers instructed participants to rate the believability of I am a bad person (anondefusion statement) compared to I am having the thought that I am a bad person (adefusion statement). Findings from this study demonstrated that the defusion statementswere rated as lower in believability and in level of associated distress, compared tonondefusion statements, thus providing further evidence that defusion may be useful in the

management of unwanted negative thoughts. More recently, a growing number of studieshave demonstrated the efcacy of defusion in the laboratory with nonclinical populations(see Deacon et al., 2011; De Young, Lavender, Washington, Looby, & Anderson, 2010;Masuda, Feinstein, Wendell, & Sheehan, 2010; Masuda, Twohig, et al., 2010).

While reductions in believability and distress are noteworthy dependent measures, thevalidity of self-report measures has often been questioned (Gannon, 2006). Perhaps a moreinteresting dependent measure would involve the demonstration of a postdefusion overtbehavioral change. Recently, Hooper, Sandoz, Ashton, Clarke, and McHugh (2012) used apostdefusion behavioral measure. Specically, they demonstrated that a brief defusionintervention for managing chocolate cravings altered the amount of postintervention

chocolate eaten by participants in this group, compared to those in thought suppression andcontrol groups.

An experimental method of inducing a depressed-like state and negative psychologicalcontent involves exposing participants to an unsolvable task, or an uncontrollablerelationship between an action and its outcome (Teasdale & Fogarty, 1979). Priorexperience with uncontrollable events has been demonstrated to retard the acquisition ofsubsequent new responses (Overmier & Seligman, 1967; Seligman, 1975), such as responsetimes to completion on a maze task (Reed, Frasquillo, Colkin, Liemann, & Colbert, 2001),performance on discrimination (Hiroto & Seligman, 1975), and judgment of control tasks(Maldonado, Martos, & Ramrez, 1991). This effect has been termed learned helplessness(Seligman, 1975). Attribution-style accounts of learned helplessness have directly linkednegative self-evaluations to subsequent hampered performance, thus providing theoretical


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The next task will last between 2 and 10 minutes depending on yourperformance. It is a simple task. Your job during this task is to notice yourthoughts as they show up. As you do this, try not to get caught in believingany one of these thoughts; instead, see them as thoughts and not reality. Theexercise below will help you to do this:

Notice each of your thoughts as they pop into your head. The thought may be

this is too easy, I am very bad at this exercise, or I dont know what Imthinking! One by one, notice each thought that you have and let them just passby your consciousness. It may even be helpful to alter the thought from this istoo easy/I am very bad at this exercise to right now, I am having the thoughtthat this is too easy/I am having the thought that I am very bad at this exercise.

Participants assigned to the thought distraction group received a copy of the followinginstructions:

The next task will last between 2 and 10 minutes depending on yourperformance. It is a simple task. Your job during this task is to notice your

thoughts as they show up. As you do this, do not let those thoughts affectyou, simply suppress all thoughts and stay focused on the task. The exercisebelow will help you to do this:

Think of a good thought. Keep that thought in mind. Anytime bad thoughtscome into your mind, immediately replace them with the good thought.Suppress all negative thoughts and allow the good thought to remain.

Participants assigned to the control group were given no instruction and proceededdirectly to the next step in the experiment. Participants were then asked to complete thelearned helplessness computer task while incorporating their respective instruction.

Learned helplessness.Each participant read through the instructions on the computerscreen that corresponded with the learned helplessness preparation (the preparation was adirect replication of that used by Maldonado et al., 1991). Only the unsolvable version ofthe task was used. The instructions were as follows:

In this experiment, you will be looking at a series of computer-presentedimages. Each image will involve two stimulus patterns on it. One to the leftand another to the right. The stimulus patterns are composed of four differentdimensions, with two values associated with each dimension. For eachpresentation, I have chosen one of the eight values as being correct. For eachimage, I want you to choose which side contains this value. To do this, youmust click on one of the buttons presented underneath the image (left orright). If your choice is incorrect, a noise comes on through the speakers, butif you choose the correct side, there will be no noise. Your task is to learn thepredetermined value by your response, according to whether or not the noiseis heard. The current experiment is adapted from a standard intelligence test.Most people learn to respond appropriately to the task with relative ease.

See Figure 1 for a visual representation of the learned helplessness program.Participants were asked to choose between two panels that could differ from each otheracross four different dimensions, each of which encompassed two values: (a) color (red vs.green), (b) shape (square vs. circle), (c) font size (large vs. small), and (d) letter (T vs.


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213DEFUSION VERSUS THOUGHT DISTRACTION

T A

Figure 1.A sample screen from the learned helplessness preparation.

Each participant completed 4 sets of 10 trials. In essence, via trial and error, eachparticipant had to work out which one of two values within four different dimensions wascorrect in each set. The participants were instructed that if they chose the correct value, nonoise occurred, whereas if they chose an incorrect value, a loud noise was played throughthe speakers of the computer. Unbeknownst to the participants, however, they had no controlover the preparation. In order to induce learned helplessness, the incorrect noise waspresented on 50% of the trials, regardless of the buttons the participants pressed. Feedback

throughout the experiment was random and not contingent on any particular value.Prior to beginning the preparation, all participants were asked if the instructions were

understood, and they were given time to ask questions and receive further explanation ofwhat was necessary to conduct the task.

Maze task.Upon completion of the learned helplessness preparation, a page with amaze task was placed on the desk in front of the participant. Each participant wasinstructed to complete the maze and told that his or her completion time would be recorded.The instructions were as follows:

Please complete the maze on the table in front of you in the quickest time

possible. Your time will be recorded. In order to complete the maze task, youhave to begin at the X marked on the perimeter of the maze and work yourway to the center. As soon as you begin, I will start the stopwatch.

The time taken to complete the maze was recorded by a researcher who was blind tothe experimental group the participant had been assigned to. At the end of the experiment,participants were fully debriefed.

Results

Questionnaires


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Maze Task

The amount of time taken to complete the maze task across the three groups ispresented in Figure 2. From Figure 2, it can be seen that the defusion group (M= 39 s) tookless time to complete the maze than both the thought distraction group (M= 52.5 s) and thecontrol group (M= 49.1 s). This suggests that the participants who received the defusioninstruction were least affected by the learned helplessness preparation in the subsequent

behavioral task.

Defusion Distraction Control

SecondsTakenT

oCompletetheMazeTask

60

55

50

45

40

35

30

Figure 2.Mean (standard error) amount of time taken to complete the maze task across the defusion,

distraction, and control conditions.

A one-way between-subjects ANOVA revealed a statistically signicant main effectfor maze completion time, F(2, 64) = 6.147, p< .005, 2= .17. A series of post-hoc TukeyHSD tests were conducted in order to determine where these differences emerged. Resultsfrom the defusion versus thought distraction analysis revealed a signicant difference(p= .004, SE= 4.08) in completion time, suggesting that participants in the thoughtdistraction group completed the maze in a signicantly slower time than did those in thedefusion group. Additionally, the defusion group completed the maze in signicantly lesstime than did the control group (p= .043, SE= 4.18). However, there was no signicantdifference between the thought distraction group and the control group (p= .701,SE= 4.22).

Discussion

The current study aimed to compare the effectiveness of defusion versus thoughtdistraction in dealing with the negative psychological content associated with attemptingto complete an unsolvable task (i.e., a learned helplessness induction). The effects oflearned helplessness are demonstrated in the literature by impaired performance on asubsequent task. For example, previous research by Reed et al. (2001) demonstratedsignicantly slower response times to completion on a postlearned helplessness maze

task. The results of the current study showed that participants who received a briefdefusion instruction performed significantly better on the maze task, after having

l d l d h l l i h d h i h h h


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As a piece of preliminary research, the results of the current study are encouraging.However, there are three limitations that may compromise the internal and externalvalidity of the study. First, the instruction for the defusion group was slightly longer (63words) than that of the thought distraction group. Most people (80%) report using thoughtdistraction as a coping strategy for dealing with unwanted thoughts (Rachman & De Silva,1978). Therefore, it is likely that participants in the current study were already procient indistraction-based techniques for managing unwanted thoughts. However, exposure toacceptance-based techniques like defusion presumably would be limited by comparisongiven the counterintuitive nature of these techniques. Nevertheless, this does not removethe potential confound that longer instructions may have contributed to greater treatmentadherence to the defusion over the thought distraction instruction. In order to overcomethis difculty, future research could include instructions that are the same length. Thiswould involve either shortening the defusion instructions or lengthening the thoughtdistraction instructions. The latter option seems more plausible given the already briefnature of the interventions and the participants likely lack of history with defusion as acoping strategy.

Additionally, it is possible that longer instructions may have favored the defusionparticipants in two distinct but possibly related ways. First, longer defusion instructionscould have resulted in participants being more compliant. The inclusion of an interview asa check of treatment integrity after the helplessness-inducing task could help determinewhether the apparent effect of defusion on time to task completion resulted fromparticipants being more likely to engage in defusion than in distraction. Second, the longerdefusion instruction could have been perceived as more credible to participants. Acredibility check on the defusion and distraction conditions that documented no differencesbetween them would further minimize the necessity of equating the length of theirinstructions. Such a check might be conducted in two ways. As with the assessment of

treatment integrity, participants could be asked after completion of the helplessness-inducing task how credible they found the instructions they were given (e.g., Before youbegan the computerized task, how helpful did you think the suggestions you were givenabout how to handle unwanted thoughts during the task would be to you?). Alternatively,another group of students comparable to the participants in this study could be asked tosimply rate the credibility of the two sets of instructions.

The second limitation that may also have compromised the internal validity of thestudy concerns the lack of treatment adherence. The current study did not conduct aposttask interview with the participants to determine how they managed the unwantedthoughts that arose from attempting to complete the unsolvable task. Although the

behavioral results of the study are consistent with pre-experimental predictions, without atreatment adherence check, it is impossible to know for certain whether the participantsfrom any of the groups engaged in their respective instructions. Future research shouldinclude a posttask assessment of treatment adherence in order to improve the internalvalidity of the study.

Finally, previous defusion-based studies use thought believability and distress measurespre- and postexperimentally in order to gauge the efcacy of the defusion technique.Although the behavioral effects of the current study are interesting in their own right, futureresearch should include separate believability and distress measures. This would not onlysupplement the ndings of the behavioral measure but also allow a comparison between the

ndings of the current study and those of previous defusion-based studies.


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