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Category: Analysis

Description: While worry and rumination are highly prevalent features of internalizing disorders, their cognitive mechanisms remain unclear. Moreover, uncovering these mechanisms has proved challenging experimentally, as worried and ruminative thoughts often occur in the absence of measurable behaviors. To date, free-association paradigms and semantic word associations have shown some promise for uncovering mechanisms of worry and rumination, though this work remains in early stages. Here, we analyze word-association data using a dynamic attractor-state modelling that conceptualizes repetitive negative thinking as a phenomenon of spontaneously navigating a multidimensional semantic space while in the presence of a strong maladaptive attractor space. A primary data collection of this study has already taken place. We collected data from 65 in-person participants and 79 online participants. The goal of the present proposal is to conduct a large data collection of 300 online participants in order to replicate previous findings (Migó et al., 2023). Migó, M., Kragel, P., Cooper, J., Meneses, M., Treadway, M. (April 2023). A Dynamic Model of Spontaneous Stuck Thought – Society for Biological Psychiatry, San Diego