Thought Suppression as a Psychological Amplifier of Motion Sickness: A Contextual Literature Review

Abstract

This literature review examines whether thought suppression may intensify motion sickness and visually induced motion sickness. The central claim is deliberately cautious. The recent literature does not yet provide a large body of direct experiments showing that suppressing thoughts about nausea reliably worsens motion sickness. However, several adjacent evidence streams make the claim theoretically plausible and empirically testable. Contemporary motion sickness research defines motion sickness as a physiological response to provocative physical or visual motion that includes nausea, dizziness, thermoregulatory disruption, altered arousal, headache, and ocular strain. Recent work also emphasizes individual susceptibility, cognitive load, interoceptive processing, anxiety, expectation, autonomic regulation, and gut-brain communication. Contemporary thought-suppression research has also become more nuanced. Suppression does not always cause rebound, but suppression can become maladaptive when it creates continuous monitoring, high cognitive demand, threat appraisal, and rigid avoidance of internal experience. This review integrates these strands to propose a contextual model. Thought suppression may worsen motion sickness when it increases monitoring of nausea-related sensations, competes with limited cognitive resources, strengthens negative expectancy, and amplifies autonomic or gastrointestinal feedback loops. The review concludes that future research should test suppression, acceptance, distraction, and reappraisal instructions during motion-sickness exposure using symptom ratings, physiological measures, eye tracking, and longitudinal habituation designs.