Courtesy of Association for Psychological Science
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World Science staff

If you want to get rid of unwanted, negative thoughts, you might try just ripping them up and tossing them in the trash, according to a new psychological study.

Scientists found that when people wrote down their thoughts on a piece of paper and threw that away, they mentally discarded the thoughts too. Not only, but this trick worked even when instead of a paper note, it was a computer file, and instead of a real trash can, it was the computer’s "recycle bin."

People were also found to be more likely to use a thought in forming a judgment if they first wrote it down and tucked the paper in a pocket.

The results are published online in the research journal Psychological Science.

"However you tag your thoughts — as trash or as worthy of protection — seems to make a difference in how you use those thoughts," said study co-author Richard Petty of Ohio State University. "Merely imagining engaging in these actions has no effect," he added. "The more convinced the person is that the thoughts are really gone, the better."

Some types of psychological therapy use versions of the throw-away approach to try to help patients discard negative thoughts. Petty said this is the first study he knows of that validates that method. "At some level, it can sound silly. But we found that it really works."

The findings suggest people can treat their thoughts as material objects, Petty said. That’s evident in the language we use. "We talk about our thoughts as if we can visualize them. We hold our thoughts. We take stances on issues, we lean this way or that way. This all makes our thoughts more real to us."

Petty conducted three experiments with colleagues from the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid in Spain.

In the first, 83 Spanish high school students participated in a study that, they were told, was about body image. Each student was told to write down either positive or negative thoughts about his or her body, then look back at what they wrote. Researchers told half of the youngsters to contemplate their thoughts and then throw them in the trash can, "because their thoughts did not have to remain with them." The other half were told to contemplate their thoughts and check them for grammar and spelling.

The participants then rated their attitudes about their own bodies.

Results indicated that for those who kept their thoughts and checked them for mistakes, youths who wrote positive thoughts had more positive attitudes toward their bodies a few minutes later than did those who wrote negative thoughts. But those who threw their thoughts away showed no difference in how they rated their bodies, regardless of whether they wrote positive or negative thoughts.

"When they threw their thoughts away, they didn’t consider them anymore, whether they were positive or negative," Petty said.

In a second experiment, 284 students participated in a similar activity, except this time they were asked to write negative or positive thoughts about something most people believe is good: the Mediterranean diet (the diet emphasizes high consumption of fruits, vegetables, legumes and unrefined cereals, with olive oil as the basic fat).

In this case, some threw the thoughts away, some left them on their desk, and some were told to put the paper in their pocket, wallet or purse and keep it with them. All participants were then asked to rate their attitudes toward the diet and intentions to use it.

As in the first experiment, those who kept the list of thoughts at their desk were found to be more influenced by them when evaluating the diet than were those who threw them away. But those who protected their thoughts by putting them in a pocket or purse were even more influenced than those who kept the thoughts on their desk.

"This suggests you can magnify your thoughts, and make them more important to you, by keeping them with you in your wallet or purse," Petty said.

But how important is the physical action? The researchers conducted a third experiment using computers. In this case, 78 Spanish college students wrote their thoughts in a computer word-processing document. Some later used a mouse to drag the file into the computer recycle bin, while others moved the file to a storage disk. As in the previous studies, participants were found to use the negative thoughts less if they electronically "trashed" them.

In one other condition, some participants were told to simply imagine dragging their negative thoughts to the recycle bin or saving them to a disk. But that had no effect on their later judgments. "Of course, even if you throw the thoughts in a garbage can or put them in the recycle bin on the computer, they are not really gone — you can regenerate them," Petty said. "But the representations of those thoughts are gone, at least temporarily, and it seems to make it easier to not think about them."

Petty said the researchers plan to see if this technique could work to help people haunted by recurrent, negative thoughts, such as memories of the death of a loved one. "We want to find out if there is a way to keep those thoughts from coming back, at least for longer periods of time."

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