Asking ‘why’ still increases intrusions: A response to Ayduk and Kross (2008)

In their response piece, Ayduk and Kross (Ayduk, O., & Kross, E. (2008). Asking ‘why’ from a distance facilitates emotional processing: a reanalysis of Wimalaweera and Moulds (2008). Behaviour Research and Therapy) raised a number of interesting and important points regarding the findings reported in our recently published paper (Wimalaweera, S., & Moulds, M.L. (2008). Processing memories of anger-eliciting events: the effect of asking ‘why’ from a distance. Behaviour Research and Therapy, 46, 402-409.). Their additional analyses of our dataset resulted in a thought-provoking response to our paper. We are grateful for their interest in and consideration of our findings, and for the opportunity to respond to their concerns. We concur with many of the points that they raised. Nonetheless, a number of their procedures and interpretations warrant comment and clarification. Most critically, we correct what appears to be a fundamental misunderstanding of our argument that encouraging distanced-why recall facilitates rather than results in avoidance. In so doing, we address their repeated criticism that the avoidance subscale of the Impact of Event Scale was omitted from the original analyses. Second, we address the rationale for the lack of consistency in the inclusion of all of the experimental conditions in the additional analyses, particularly in light of the theoretical relevance of the immersed-what condition to elucidating the processes that facilitate emotional processing. We call for a consistent analytic strategy, emphasize the need for replication with larger samples, and urge caution in the extrapolation of experimental findings to clinical recommendations.