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The present study explored the idea that the tendency to experience intrusive memories might be associated with relatively weak cognitive control in general as indexed by the general propensity to become distracted by irrelevant information. A sample of undergraduate students (N = 413) filled in self-report measures of involuntary memories, distractibility, depression and repressive coping. The results showed a significant relation between involuntary memories and distractibility, independent of both trait depression and repressive coping, indicating a general vulnerability factor. As cognitive control may be sensitive to circadian variation, time of day effects in the experience of intrusions were also explored. No significant relation emerged. A proposed relationship between deficient inhibitory mechanisms of working memory and vulnerability for developing and maintaining intrusive memories after experiencing a stressful event is also discussed. (c) 2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Participants tend to claim that nonfamous names refer to well-known people when they have previously been required to read these nonfamous names. This false fame effect originates from source monitoring errors. In two studies, we explored whether high levels of absorption or fantasy proneness are related to such source monitoring errors. While an overall false fame effect did occur, neither high absorption nor high fantasy prone participants were found to display a stronger false fame effect than participants low on these personality traits. Our findings suggest that the effects of these individual differences on false fame are in fact small and that the false fame effect is not the most suitable paradigm to study clinical relevant memory illusions. (c) 2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

The present study examined whether high and low dissociative individuals differ in their ability to keep target stimuli out of their awareness (suppression) and how this relates to their memory of those targets during a later cued recall task. The prediction was that high dissociators display a general inability to focus attention and that their distractibility undermines successful suppression, thereby enhancing memory for suppressed items. College students with high (n = 35) and low (n = 33) scores on the Dissociative Experiences Scale participated in a Dutch version of Anderson and Green's (2001) Think-No Think (TNT) task. Overall, a significant suppression effect emerged. However, no differences between high and low dissociators were observed. Thus, the present results do not confirm that dissociation is linked to heightened distractibility. (c) 2005 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.