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A worm that bursts into ours mind, a constant torment, a bad memory that does not leave us: we are all victims of negative and unwanted thoughtswhich can sometimes become recurring and nagging. Managing them is not easy, but a recent study by researchers at the University of Jerusalem in Israel has shed light on a new approach to controlling negative thoughtswhich would allow our mind to avoid falling into the circuits that feed them and make them repeat. The results, found thanks to the computational analysis of the responses and reactions of the eighty volunteers who participated in the study, were published in the journal Plos Computational Biology.
Being able to control thoughts
Sometimes it takes very little to trigger a negative thought: a small signal, such as a song, a smell, an object, can evoke unwanted reflections or memories in our brain, related to things we may not want to think about and that occur repeatedly. Everyone has their own methods of preventing these thoughts from invading our mind, but people generally report using strategies that are based on thought suppression and on distractionin a process that is said to reactive control. To be clearer, when the intrusive thought comes to the mind, we try to eliminate it by simply trying to focus on something else: this however occurs only after the unwanted thought has already disturbed us and does not always manage to be effective.
Other studies have suggested that our brains might stop a thought from reaching our mind even before realizing it in a conscious way and therefore before making the effort to distract ourselves from it: this process is called proactive control. However, the mechanisms underlying the control of thoughts are still unclear and need to be further investigated: it is possible, in fact, find a way that prevents unwanted thoughts or memories from coming to mind just when you encounter the signals that would activate them? And at the same time, when trying to reactively distract from negative thoughts, there is a mechanism that can ensuring that the same unwanted memory doesn’t keep surfacing over and over again?
This is what the authors of the study wondered, considering that investigating these complex aspects of the functioning of thought has important implications for understanding the ways in which we avoid constant interference from unwanted thoughts and why some people experience more intrusive and repetitive thoughts than others. To have a less complex starting point, the researchers focused on mechanisms of thinking during free associations of words.
Negative thoughts can be self-reinforcing
In particular, in fact, the researchers asked the study participants to invent new associations with sixty words which were displayed individually and randomly on a screen. For example, the word “table” could be associated with the words “chair”, “counter”, “eat”, “tablecloth”. During the experiment, each word was presented five times. One group of participants was told that they would only receive a cash reward if had not repeated the associations already made: if the first time the word “table” was answered “chair”, from the second time onwards they could not repeat the word “chair”, but make a new association of words. In simple terms, there word not to be uttered became an unwanted thought to be avoided.
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