Mechanistic insights into rumination: implications for mental health and subjective experience

During my PhD project, my aim is to explore how the process of rumination shapes mental health and the subjective conscious experience. Rumination is a form of excessive, repetitive negative thinking that involves an involuntarily focused attention on negative content of past and present and leads to emotional distress (Nolen-Hoekshema, 1991). Because of its repetitive and involuntary nature, this process has been proposed to be a key element in multiple models of mental illness (e.g. depression, anxiety, OCD [Watkins and Roberts, 2020]).It is hypothesized that rumination sets off the 'vicious cycle' that creates a clinical disorder from otherwise regular negative thoughts and behaviours. However, many components of this hypothesis remain untested, partially because the tools to measure and understand rumination are limited. Similarly, rumination being bounded in inner speech links it to the formation of subjective conscious experience with specific predictions formulated by models such as the HOLISTIC model (Skipper, 2022). As the subjective experience is inseparable from mental health, exploring mechanistic links between the three would provide new insights into how mental illnesses function and how they can be treated.