The recall of dementia-related and neutral words by people with dementia: The ironic process of thought suppression.

This study adapts a social psychological paradigm to explore whether an important psychological mechanism for reducing distress can be affected by cognitive impairment. Our findings suggest that for people living with dementia, thought suppression may be either ineffective in reducing conscious awareness of distal threats or operate in an ironic fashion. While threatening proximal material may be repressed from awareness, distal threats may return into implicit awareness. This casts new light on research and has clinical implications.