Repression and self-presentation: When audiences interfere with self-deceptive strategies.

To defend against threatening feedback, one may avoid and ignore it, or one may dwell on it and think of refutations. Repressors who received threatening feedback privately spent the least amount of time reading it, whereas repressors who received the same feedback publicly spent a long time reading it. Thus, the audience prevented repressors from ignoring threatening feedback; instead, they thought and worried about the partner's (bad) impression of them. Nonrepressors were unaffected by the favorability of the evaluation or the public nature of the situation. Repressors showed superior recall for the few bits of threatening information embedded in a generally favorable evaluation, suggesting that they are especially sensitive when their defenses are down.