Lane et al. contend that past trauma gives rise to maladaptive or inappropriate emotional responses that become incorporated into semantic structures that are inappropriately overapplied to future situations. The authors argue that therapy is most effective when it can alter the memory structures responsible for these responses in order to give rise to more positive emotional experiences and outcomes.

Recent research in social cognition on the antecedents of implicit attitude revision can inform the central question of when implicit affective change may be possible in clinical settings. Traditionally, implicit attitudes have been assumed to consist of associative mental processes that operate irrespective of the perceived truth or endorsement of the attitude (Rydell & McConnell Reference Rydell and McConnell2006; Rydell et al. Reference Rydell, McConnell, Mackie and Strain2006; Reference Rydell, McConnell, Strain, Claypool and Hugenberg2007; Sloman Reference Sloman1996; Strack & Deutsch Reference Strack and Deutsch2004; cf. Ferguson et al. Reference Ferguson, Mann, Wojnowicz, Sherman, Gawronski and Trope2014). They have been assumed to be relatively difficult to update, especially through the negation of past learning (Deutsch et al. Reference Deutsch, Gawronski and Strack2006; Gawronski et al., Reference Gawronski, Deutsch, Mbirkou, Selbt and Strack2008; see also Gawronski & Bodenhausen Reference Gawronski and Bodenhausen2006; Reference Gawronski and Bodenhausen2011). Revision of implicit responses seems to occur mostly only after extensive retraining (e.g., Kawakami et al. Reference Kawakami, Dovidio, Moll, Hermsen and Russin2000), and these new attitudes are assumed to not replace the initial attitude but rather coexist with it, allowing the original response to resurface (e.g., Gawronski et al. Reference Gawronski, Rydell, Vervliet and De Houwer2010; Petty et al. Reference Petty, Tormala, Briñol and Jarvis2006; see Bouton Reference Bouton1994; Gawronski & Cesario Reference Gawronski and Cesario2013). Given that implicit attitudes uniquely predict many everyday behavioral responses (Cameron et al. Reference Cameron, Brown-Iannuzzi and Payne2012; Galdi et al. Reference Galdi, Arcuri and Gawronski2008; Greenwald et al. Reference Greenwald, Poehlman, Uhlmann and Banaji2009; McNulty et al. Reference McNulty, Olson, Meltzer and Shaffer2013; Perugini et al. Reference Perugini, Richetin and Zogmaister2010; Towles-Schwen & Fazio Reference Towles-Schwen and Fazio2006; cf. Oswald et al. Reference Oswald, Mitchell, Blanton, Jaccard and Tetlock2013), and potentially play a role in dysfunctional interpersonal relationships (see McNulty et al. Reference McNulty, Olson, Meltzer and Shaffer2013; Towles-Schwen & Fazio Reference Towles-Schwen and Fazio2006), this traditional view of implicit attitudes suggests that the clinician's role in updating maladaptive implicit affective memories seems necessary but challenging.

In contrast to this view, our recent work suggests that implicit attitudes can indeed be updated in some circumstances in a way that results in strong, fast, and durable revision. These circumstances include the importance of the perceived diagnosticity of the new information (Cone & Ferguson Reference Cone and Ferguson2015; in preparation), as well as the extent to which this new information successfully recasts old information, leading participants to reinterpret its meaning (Mann & Ferguson, in press). In one line of work, the extent to which participants were able to successfully incorporate new information about a person toward whom they had previously held a well-established implicit attitude, depended on how diagnostic participants believed that new information to be in terms of the “true nature” of the person (Cone & Ferguson Reference Cone and Ferguson2015). Even after forming an initial implicit attitude toward the person by learning about 100 of the person's behaviors, participants were able to completely reverse their implicit impression of the person after learning about a single, counterattitudinal behavior that was judged as highly diagnostic of the person's true character. In other work, participants learned new information that the character of two social groups (whether each was “good” or “evil”) over time switched from what they had learned previously. Their implicit attitudes toward these groups were fully revised only when participants believed that social groups more generally are capable of changing in this way (Cone & Ferguson, in preparation). These two lines of work point to the crucial role of participants' beliefs about the reliability of the updated information. As extrapolated to the therapeutic context, changing patients' implicit responses may depend on how much they believe the therapist is telling them something that seems true, and predictive of what will likely happen in the future.

In another program of work, we have shown that implicit attitudes can be durably reversed when participants are given information that helps them reinterpret past information (Mann & Ferguson, in press). After learning about someone who enacted many negative acts, participants learn about a single new behavior that either explains and recasts the initial acts as in fact being positive, or does not. When given an explanation for all the initial negative behavior, participants were able to readily update their implicit impression of that person, moving from a strongly negative to a strongly positive implicit reaction to the person. Importantly, we found evidence that this effect was driven by an active (effortful) reappraisal of past learning, and was limited to new information that explained past behavior rather than simply added to it. This updating also showed signs of being durable, as it emerged just as strongly three days later. These findings reveal the power of reinterpretation in implicit attitude change. We argue that a person's ability to put a negative behavior in a different explanatory framework may be a crucial ingredient in implicit updating.

Thus, emerging evidence in social cognition suggests that implicit attitudes (affective responses; Amodio & Devine Reference Amodio and Devine2006) can sometimes be quickly and durably altered, contrary to traditional views of these types of evaluations as being resistant to alteration. From a clinical perspective, our findings suggest that a patient must ultimately come to believe that new information or a reinterpretation of old information provided by a therapist is diagnostic for future situations. Therapists can leverage such deliberative processes in order to successfully induce relatively rapid changes in the implicit responses that give rise to the trauma.

A point of convergence among Lane et al.'s thesis and our own work on implicit attitude revision is that we both consider the recollection of past learning to be an important factor in effective updating. This claim is suggestive that reconsolidation is a potentially important factor necessary for such updating to occur. However, this still remains to be tested for both therapeutic approaches (e.g., psychodynamic therapy), as well as implicit attitude revision.

In the meantime, emerging findings from social cognition are starting to align with the main tenet of Lane et al.'s integrative memory model: that maladaptive affective responses can in fact be truly changed, possibly through active reasoning about old and new information.