The conceptual building blocks of everyday thought: Tracking the emergence and dynamics of ruminative and nonruminative thinking.

Abstract

How do thoughts arise, unfold, and change over time? Are the contents and dynamics of everyday thought rooted in conceptual associations within one’s semantic networks? To address these questions, we developed the Free Association Semantic task (FAST), whereby participants generate dynamic chains of conceptual associations in response to seed words that vary in valence. Ninety-four adults from a community sample completed the FAST task and additionally described and rated six of their most frequently occurring everyday thoughts. Text analysis and valence ratings revealed similarities in thematic and affective content between FAST concept chains and recurrent autobiographical thoughts. Dynamic analyses revealed that individuals higher in rumination were more strongly attracted to negative conceptual spaces and more likely to remain there longer. Overall, these findings provide quantitative evidence that conceptual associations may act as a semantic scaffold for more complex everyday thoughts, and that more negative and less dynamic conceptual associations in ruminative individuals mirror maladaptive repetitive thoughts in daily life.

When self comes to a wandering mind: Brain representations and dynamics of self-generated concepts in spontaneous thought

“…For example, as shown in the current study, the dynamic modeling combined with machine learning has the potential to be used as an assessment tool for depression and anxiety in adjunct to self-report. Even in the absence of participant’s own self-report ratings, we previously showed in a behavioral FAST study that the affective dynamics of thought predicted individual differences in trait rumination ( 12 ), a common symptom of mood and anxiety disorders. Thus, if we can implement an automated sentiment analyzer into the analysis pipeline, we can shorten the task time markedly, providing a possibility to use the FAST as a web- or mobile-based monitoring tool for depression and anxiety.…”

“…Participants were asked to generate a total of 40 consecutive concepts for each seed word, and we used four seed words for four runs total. We made the number of associations for each seed word much longer than our previous study ( 12 ), in which we collected only 10 consecutive concepts to obtain a larger number of personal concepts. The four seed words were “family,” “tear,” “mirror,” and “abuse” for the first session and “love,” “fantasy,” “heart,” and “pain” for the retest session.…”

“…Despite the significance of dynamic, spontaneous thought in human psychology and psychopathology, few quantitative tools and methods are currently available for neuroimaging studies. To overcome this challenge, we adapted a recently developed task—the Free Association Semantic Task (FAST) ( 12 )—to use in conjunction with fMRI. The FAST integrates ideas from free word association, experience sampling, and naturalistic tasks and, when adapted to a neuroimaging context, shows promise in revealing the dynamically unfolding signatures of spontaneous thought.…”

“…Adopting a complex dynamic systems view, spontaneous thought could be regarded as a random walk on a semantic network, in which the nodes represent autobiographical and semantic concepts, and the edges are the associations among the nodes established through past experiences (8)(9)(10). In this framework, recurrent thoughts can be regarded as sticky nodes or strong attractors of the network (11,12).…”

If you don’t let it in, you don’t have to get it out: Thought preemption as a method to control unwanted thoughts

“…To simplify the problem, we focus here on thought control in the specific case of associative memory retrieval. Tasks probing associative memory are a useful tool for investigating thought processes, as evidenced by the relationship between people’s responses in a free association task and their everyday thoughts [ 20 ]. Numerous studies have demonstrated people’s ability to intentionally forget memories learned in the lab.…”