Anatomy of the White Bear Suppression Inventory (WBSI): a review of previous findings and a new approach

The White Bear Suppression Inventory (WBSI; Wegner & Zanakos, 1994) was originally designed to assess people's inclination toward thought suppression. In this article, we provide a detailed review of previous findings on the structure of this instrument and present a study that took a new statistical approach. It involved an exploratory factor analysis of the French WBSI using the weighted least squares mean and variance estimator as well as parametric item response theory analyses. Results clearly supported a 2-factor structure with a "suppression" and an "intrusion" dimension. Follow-up regression analyses revealed that intrusion significantly predicted anxiety and depression scores, whereas suppression did not.

Keywords

Humans
*Personality
*Personality Inventory
*Psychological Tests
Semantics
Thinking

UNIGE affiliation entities

UNIGE research groups

Affective sciences

Citation (ISO format)

SCHMIDT, Ralph Erich et al. Anatomy of the White Bear Suppression Inventory (WBSI): a review of previous findings and a new approach. In: Journal of personality assessment, 2009, vol. 91, n° 4, p. 323–330. doi: 10.1080/00223890902935738

Article

Identifiers

PID : unige:20085
DOI : 10.1080/00223890902935738
PMID : 20017061

Journal ISSN

0022-3891

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23/04/2012 13:32:16

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23/04/2012 13:32:16

Update

14/10/2025 00:13:45

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14/03/2023 17:27:37

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31/08/2026 08:34:44

Anatomy of the White Bear Suppression Inventory (WBSI): a review of previous findings and a new approach

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