Abstract
Our mind’s eye and the role of internal attention in mental life and suffering has intrigued scholars for centuries. Yet, experimental study of internal attention has been elusive due to our limited capacity to control the timing and content of internal stimuli. We thus developed the Simulated Thoughts Paradigm (STP) to experimentally deliver own-voice thought stimuli that simulate the content and experience of thinking and thereby experimental study of internal attentional processes. In independent experiments (N = 122) integrating STP into established cognitive-experimental tasks, we found and replicated evidence that emotional reactivity to negative thoughts predicts difficulty disengaging internal attention from, as well as biased selective internal attention of, those thoughts; these internal attention processes predict cognitive vulnerability (e.g., negative repetitive thinking) which thereby predict anxiety and depression. Proposed methods and findings may have implications for the study of information processing and attention in mental health broadly and models of internal attentional (dys)control in cognitive vulnerability and mental health more specifically.
Highlights
Awareness of its ontogeny (see[16])
working memory (WM) tasks by design rely on memory processes affecting task performance and make inferences regarding the role(s) of internal attentional processes based on the cognitive operations required to complete these tasks[35,36]
We found no evidence of serial mediation for depression (Effect = 0.013; 95% confidence interval (95%CI): − 0.016 to 0.350) or anxiety (Effect = −0.008.; 95%CI: − 0.254 to 0.030) nor any associations between negative emotional reactivity and overall accuracy (M1) or between overall accuracy and any form of cognitive vulnerability (M2)
Summary
Awareness of its ontogeny (see[16]). We propose that much like how goal-directed and stimulus-driven attentional systems may subserve external attention and its dysregulation over motivationally-relevant information[7,17], goaldirected/stimulus-driven systems may subserve internal attention and its dysregulation (e.g., difficulty disengaging from thoughts, attentional capture by unwanted memories, etc.). Dysregulated internal attentional processes may subserve a variety of higher-order cognitive processes which have long been implicated in anxiety and depression such as repetitive negative thinking (e.g., rumination, worry), emotional (dys)regulation, and self-focused attention[6,22,23,24,25] It has been theorized, for example, that internal attention processes contribute to rumination and depression via the narrowing scope of attention to mood congruent thoughts[26], impaired disengagement from self-referential information[18] and subsequent difficulty inhibiting nolonger relevant information from working memory[27]. Mounting evidence suggests that persons with elevated levels of repetitive negative thinking[22] show impaired inhibition or disengagement from no-longer relevant information in WM (independent of the emotional valence of the information)[34] This body of work provides important albeit indirect evidence as to the specific or unique role(s) of internal attentional processes (e.g., biased selection, impaired disengagement) in cognitive vulnerability and mental health. The experimental study of internal attention could be significantly advanced through the capacity to deliver stimuli that are phenomenologically-valid simulations of experience such as one’s own thoughts
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