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Review
'Insightful, provocative, and firmly grounded in research. Wegner's new theory is useful in addressing questions of interest to psychologists since the days of Freud and James. I will be using it in my seminar on personality.' - Elissa Wurf, Lehigh University
Review
"Insightful, provocative, and firmly grounded in research....I will be using it in my seminar on personality." --Elissa Wurf, Lehigh University
"Pioneering explorations of mental control. A major contribution to the field and a stimulating read." --David M. Clarke, University of Oxford
"Over 1000 Introduction to Psychology students have read the book and raved about it. It shows them how psychologists come up with ideas and how they go about testing these ideas through rigorous scientific research. Students also loved the writing style and found it highly engaging and accessible. However, the book should not be considered light reading. I have also used it in two graduate seminars and the students have consistently had high praise for how Wegner weaves together diverse psychological theories to arrive at an important understanding of mental control and the self-regulation of emotion." --Todd Heatherton, Ph.D., Harvard University
"For Dan Wegner, asking people to avoid thoughts of a white bear is more than a clever demonstration. It is one of the tasks he has used for some years now in a creative set of laboratory experiments on the consequences on the deliberate thought suppression. These consequences are something of a paradox: the more one tries not to think a particular thought, the more that thought invades conscious awareness..."White Bears and Other Unwanted Thoughts" is a clever, engaging, and highly readable book that explores how individuals try to influence the contents of their own consciousness and the reasons for the success and failure of these attempts." --Peter Salovey and Paula M. Niedenthal in "Imagination, Cognition and Personality "
"Pioneering explorations of mental control. A major contribution to the field and a stimulating read." --David M. Clarke, University of Oxford
"Over 1000 Introduction to Psychology students have read the book and raved about it. It shows them how psychologists come up with ideas and how they go about testing these ideas through rigorous scientific research. Students also loved the writing style and found it highly engaging and accessible. However, the book should not be considered light reading. I have also used it in two graduate seminars and the students have consistently had high praise for how Wegner weaves together diverse psychological theories to arrive at an important understanding of mental control and the self-regulation of emotion." --Todd Heatherton, Ph.D., Harvard University
"For Dan Wegner, asking people to avoid thoughts of a white bear is more than a clever demonstration. It is one of the tasks he has used for some years now in a creative set of laboratory experiments on the consequences on the deliberate thought suppression. These consequences are something of a paradox: the more one tries not to think a particular thought, the more that thought invades conscious awareness..."White Bears and Other Unwanted Thoughts" is a clever, engaging, and highly readable book that explores how individuals try to influence the contents of their own consciousness and the reasons for the success and failure of these attempts." --Peter Salovey and Paula M. Niedenthal in "Imagination, Cognition and Personality "
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When I first learned there was such a thing as an indelible pencil (I think it was in third grade) I was overwhelmed. Read the first page
Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Index | Back Cover
When I first learned there was such a thing as an indelible pencil (I think it was in third grade) I was overwhelmed. Read the first page
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Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Index | Back Cover
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
36 of 37 people found the following review helpful
Format:Mass Market Paperback
To really get to grips with this book you need have some quality undisturbed time alone. This complex yet thorough book is so informative you begin to realise the way the mind thinks and just how easy it is to change it. I suffered from terrible consistent thoughts which i couldnt get out of my head from day to day , night to night. This was not obssesive compulsive disorder this was a disorder I had created in my own mind through fear and anxiety. This book tells you just how easy it is too develop an unwanted thought. The trick is to face the thought and try not to push it aside. The more you push it away the harder it comes back at you. This book saved my sanity!
Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta)
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7 reviews
34 of 34 people found the following review helpful
Easy to read, enlightening, offers different perspective
29 Mar 2000
Format:Paperback
An excellent read for serious students of psychology AND for everybody else.
The upshot of this book is that (according to Wegner's research, which is described in sufficient detail for the reader to make his or her own judgments) the best way to get rid of an obsession is to stop trying to. Wegner's research has found that trying hard to squelch a thought is likely to make it stick harder.
Wegner spends some time discussing how this specifically might tie in to depression, in which a person gets stuck in a rut of negative mood and thought and then is preoccupied with wishing that negative mood weren't there.
You can also come up with areas in your own life in which you've wanted to get rid of some thought and couldn't. Wegner explains what to do when that happens.
"Mental control" in the title refers to how we control our own thoughts -- using our thoughts. It's a bit of a puzzle and Wegner makes some good points about it.
This book will give you a new perspective on this issue. It's a slim little book, not hard to read, but it is entirely serious and substantive. No empty-headed pop psych here. This is the real thing.
29 of 29 people found the following review helpful
Before Scheduling an Appointement With a Psych. - Read This!
24 Feb 2002
Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase
Simply put, this book changed my life... I was going through a long period (over a year in duration) where I had trouble getting rid of "unwanted thoughts"; basically thoughts that I knew would reduce the level of pleasure I was getting out of any given activity. For example, if I dwelt on X while I was undergoing some otherwise-pleasurable activity - where X is an unwanted thought - my level of enjoyment i.e. my appreciation of that activity would decrease. While I was going through these cycles of unwanted thoughts, the quality of my life was drastically reduced. I'm sure "unwanted thoughts" differ for each person, both in their individual characteristics and implications. According to this book, one should not consciously try to suppress unwanted thoughts, as thereby the thoughts will systematically persist in reemerging. Instead, just "let it be" as it were, and inevitably the unwanted thoughts will start to dissipate. Don't be dissuaded by the above editorial review, as though it is true this is not "light reading" per se, it is very well written and in an easy-to-read format with the layman in mind; and it does not contain a lot of jargon. It reads just like a novel and is quite humorous in parts. I'm not a student of psychology but had no problem with my reading and comprehnsion of this book and gleaned a lot of new information out of it, such as how meta-cognition or "thinking about thinking" works. I hate to say anything negative about this book since I found it a self-help book in the truest sense, but its only feature I didn't fully appreciate was the few charts and graphs it contained, even though they were relevant to the information at hand and supplemented the statistics well. If I were the author of the book I'd have put them in the back. That's trivial, though. In summary, next time someone says "just stop thinking about it" in replying to how you should get rid of an unwanted thought, ignore their advice - then enlighten them.
11 of 11 people found the following review helpful
A refreshing change from traditional mind control rethoric
22 Aug 2000
Format:Paperback
Since graduating high school and moving on to college, I've had significant difficulties concentrating due mostly to what could be described as unwanted thoughts - at least unwanted and the time. This book is the first one I've read that offered scientific evidence supporting the authors points. It didn't solve all my problems, but it has been a great place to start finding solutions.
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