Behaviour Research and Therapy 40 (2002) 57–66 www.elsevier.com/locate/brat Thought suppression: speciﬁcity in agoraphobia versus broad impairment in social phobia? Lydia Fehm a,* , Juergen Margraf b a Department of Clinical Psychology, Technical University of Dresden, 01062 Dresden, Germany b Department of Clinical Psychology, University of Basel, Wilhelm-Klein-Str. 27, 4025 Basel, Switzerland Accepted 11 December 2000 Abstract The paradoxical effects of intended thought suppression have been linked to psychological disorders, speciﬁcally anxiety disorders. So far, the evidence for thought suppression playing a major role in the disorder is mixed. One important issue is whether thought suppression is impaired only for thoughts related to the disorder, or if the ability for mental control is generally impaired in anxiety patients. This study compared groups of agoraphobics and social phobics with a healthy control group. All subjects were asked to suppress two topics related to the respective central fear of the two disorders and one non- speciﬁc topic. We found a rather speciﬁc deﬁcit in thought suppression for the agoraphobics; that is, when compared with the control group, we found the biggest differences for the agoraphobic fear. The social phobics seem to be characterized by a general impairment of mental control, affecting speciﬁc and non- speciﬁc stimuli. In addition, among several psychopathological variables, social anxiety proved to be the strongest predictor for problems with thought suppression. Taken together, there are several indicators that generally impaired thought suppression may be an important feature of social phobia.  2001 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved. Keywords: Thought control; Cognitive processes; Agoraphobia; Social phobia 1. Introduction In 1987 Wegner and colleagues published a study describing the effects of intended thought suppression (Wegner, Schneider, Carter, & White, 1987). The group found that intended thought * Corresponding author. Tel.: +49-351-463-6989; fax: +49-351-463-6984. E-mail address: lydia.fehm@mailbox.tu-dresden.de (L. Fehm). 0005-7967/01/$ - see front matter  2001 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved. PII:S0005-7967(01)00002-X