From tripping and falling to ruminating and worrying: a meta-control account of repetitive negative thinking

Repetitive negative thinking (RNT) is a transdiagnostic construct that encompasses rumination and worry, yet what precisely is shared between rumination and worry is unclear. To clarify this, the authors develop a meta-control account of RNT, where meta-control refers to the reinforcement and control of mental behavior via computations analogous to those that reinforce and control motor behavior. They propose rumination and worry are coarse terms for failure in meta-control, just as tripping and falling are coarse terms for failure in motor control. The paper delineates four meta-control stages and risk factors increasing the chance of failure at each: open-ended thoughts (stage 1), individual differences influencing subgoal execution (stage 2) and switching (stage 3), and challenges inherent to learning adaptive mental behavior (stage 4). Distinguishing these stages elucidates diverse processes leading to the same behavior of excessive RNT and subsumes prominent clinical accounts within a computational cognitive neuroscience framework.

Peter F Hitchcock, Michael J Frank