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| Jessica Andrews-Hanna U CO Boulder |
In corresponding w/Jessica recently, she asked for comments on her "A penny for your thoughts: dimensions of self-generated thought content and relationships with individual differences in emotional well being". It gives some new and interesting perspectives on the content and impact of different types of self-referential thoughts.
Jessica, et al. @ the Univ of Colorado Boulder, focused on whether the underlying costs (and benefits) of self-generated thought depend on "content regulation", and if so, can folk regulate the content to just positive, productive topics where they would experience improved emotional health and wellbeing. If they couldn't, then would negative thought predominate and generate poor emotional health and wellbeing.
There were three types of self-referential thinking studied:
a) "Depressive" is thinking in which folk "overgeneralize" based on single instances and autobiographical memories; these thoughts are associated with "unconstructive consequences".
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b) "Rumination" is repetitive thinking on "one's symptoms of distress and the circumstances surrounding those symptoms". Folk who "ruminated" have more negative and self-focused thought which is less specific, resulting in higher levels of depressive symptoms.
c) "Mindfulness" is a "purposeful, present-minded and non-judgmental mode of awareness", which has fewer negative self-referential thoughts and a "heightened ability to let go of such thoughts". It is an effective treatment for depression.
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| Depression |
There were 76 adult participants w/a mean age of 22 years, half female, who were paid to participate. All were previously subjects in earlier studies @ the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, so had experience in such questionnaires and terminology. Thirty percent of the participants exhibited "mild" to "moderate depression", and 70% were "minimally depressed" as measured by the Beck Depression Inventory.
Participants recalled 36 different thoughts they recently had and characterized them with a three-word description and rated them on a 1 - 10 scale on 14 different "content variables":
Self-relevance Social orientation
Frequency of occurrence Specificity
Value/Importance Imagery
Centrality to one's self-identity Perspective taking
Valence Duration of the topic
Emotional intensity Temporal orientation
Goal orientation Certainty the event occurs
Most folk were also given questionnaires on emotional health and wellbeing dealing w/behaviors, feelings, actions and general styles of thinking.
This was then grouped into the three categories through much complex statistical analysis. There was "considerable variability in scores across participants".
This chart displays some "content variables" and how participants characterized their self-referential thoughts. "Self-relevant", "frequently occurring", "involve other people", "specific and detailed" and "of value/importance" had mean scores in the "agree (6)" to "strongly agree (8)" ranking.
"Emotional intensity" was a 6 while "valence" or positive/negative was slightly positive and "temporal orientation" was more future than past.
These participants perceived their self-referential thoughts as frequent, important, specific, detailed, self-relevant, and involving other people.
"Hierarchical clustering" (@ right) generated clusters around "Level of Construal", "Personal Significance", and "Outlook". The lower down they are, the more similar they are, i.e. "value" and "intensity" are more similar than either is to "frequency". "Outlook" is a positive factor; thoughts about the future were more positive than ones about the past.This study suggests that "the ability to regulate the content of self-generated thought is a key factor underlying its costs and benefits". Folk whose thoughts were more negative, more personally significant and/or less detailed, had poorer psychological wellbeing, and were characterized as "depressive" and "rumination". Folk who had thoughts which were less personally significant, more specific, and more positive had better wellbeing; they were characterized as "mindfulness".
IME, i don't believe that someone can "regulate the content of their self-generated thought". my thoughts just manifest, or not; i am not able to consciously "regulate their content". Try to "regulate" the content of your next 10 thoughts before they emerge.
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| Not Mindfulness |
However, if one changes the operating mode and interrelation of different brain networks or centers through practices like mindfulness meditation or self-inquiry, then what types of, and how many, self-referential thoughts manifest, can change dramatically. This is not a trivial distinction. Believing that there is "an entity" who is responsible for, and capable of, regulating the content of their thoughts, merely reinforces the "I/ego/selfing" construct - the source of the problem.
Also, a more “immediate” approach to the “thought sampling” approach might
produce different results. There
is much research on "false memory", some of which i was in. we display poor recall of even traumatic events, like 9/11. How folk felt about 9/11, on 9/12, or a year later was largely dictated by their current mental
state, not what they reported at the time. (Blogpost “Traumatic
memories feel true but are always changing”)
A better data set might be generated w/a smartphone “app”, as with the “Track
your Happiness” app/study, where participants would be given a message @ random times and would do the test "right now".As future-oriented thoughts were perceived as more positive than past-oriented ones, it would be logical to tell folk - "Just think positive thoughts". This is much easier said than done and does nothing to really deal with the base of the problem.
Mindfulness meditation, including MBSR and MBCT, has been widely shown to produce improved health and cognitive ability and higher psychological wellbeing. It generates brain functionality changes which produce positive or less negative thought content, better emotional regulation, reduced relapse rates into recurrent depression, and improved specificity of autobiographical memory which decreases "rumination", and other negative depressive tendencies.
The paper also recommends "Quantifying an individual's full profile of thought content - perhaps in combination with the frequency with which self-generated thoughts occur, and/or the difficulty of the task during which unrelated thoughts occurs - might ultimately help researchers or clinicians distinguish between different trait dimensions and/or mental health disorders."
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| Three Neural Networks |
The paper also concludes with "...depression and rumination are linked to hyperactivity of the default network and increased connectivity with limbic reasons; recent studies suggest that the DMN is organized into multiple subsystems with dissociable functions.
How the content dimensions of self-generated thought map onto these DMN components remains an open question." Jessica's "Three Neural Networks..." paper cited above lays an excellent groundwork for this.
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| Nithya Shanti |
BTW2. i will be presenting a talk, "Disentangling Your Outdated Mental Operating System", @ the Science and NonDuality Conference in San Jose on October 25. As mentioned earlier, the blogpost "Waking Up - secularly, scientifically, nonduality, empirically", will be on the SAND website.
This is a nice advancement in Andrews-Hanna’s research. In effect, she is saying that there are multiple layers of self-referencing (experiential with neural correlates), of varying intensities, that separate dual and non-dual experience. In your particular case, all the layers ceased simultaneously. As you point out, there may be other ways to “skin the cat” as well.
ReplyDeleteFrom our work together with Jud Brewer, you’re familiar with his ongoing efforts to use neural feedback in order to help folks learn to unravel these layers.
Thanks for following and communicating this important work.