Mental imagery is a useful way to distract teens from negative thought patterns

A short-term distraction can break the thought spiral, leaving room for that person to seek help from a therapist, friend or parent, said study author Hannah Lawrence, an assistant professor of psychology in the OSU College of Liberal Arts. .

“When we get stuck thinking about negative things that happened in the past, that makes us feel even worse and leads to more difficulty regulating our emotions and our bodies,” Lawrence said. “We want to connect people with some more comprehensive strategies or skills that might get us out of those thought patterns.”

Lawrence directs the Translational Imaging, Depression, and Suicide (TIDES) Laboratory at OSU, researching risk factors and developing effective interventions for adolescent depression, including interventions that can be scaled up to make them accessible to a broader population.

“These negative things are going to happen to all of us, so knowing ahead of time what tools to pack in our toolbox that we can pull out to help reduce our emotional reactions in the moment, just enough to get us out of those loops, will help us. to get unstuck,” he said.

The study, published in the Affective Disorders Journal, whose objective was to determine which form of negative rumination (whether verbal thoughts or image-based thoughts) caused a greater drop in affect or general mood in adolescent participants; and also which thought form was most effective in distracting them and helping them get out of that negative frame of mind.

The 145 participants were between the ages of 13 and 17 and were recruited from a rural New England area where Lawrence conducted the research study. The group was predominantly white and 62% female. The participants also completed a depression questionnaire, which showed that around 39% of the group experienced clinically elevated symptoms of depression.

The researchers began by inducing a negative mood in the adolescent participants using an online game designed to create feelings of exclusion. (After the participants completed the study, the researchers explained the game to them to help alleviate any lingering feelings of pain.)

The participants were then divided into groups and asked to reflect on either verbal thoughts or mental images; or encouraged to be distracted, also in verbal thoughts or mental images. In the rumination group, participants were given prompts such as “Imagine the kind of person you think you should be.” In the distraction group, prompts like “Think about your shopping list” were meant to distract them from their negative effect.

To encourage verbal thoughts, the researchers had the participants practice sentences in their heads that described a lemon using specific words. To encourage mental imagination, they had participants practice imagining what a lemon would look like under different conditions.

The researchers used non-invasive sensors to record the electrical activity of the heart and the conductance response of the skin as a way to measure physiological responses to the various cues. They also asked the participants to rate their current emotional affect at four different points during the study.

While there was no significant difference in adolescent response between the two types of rumination (both verbal thoughts and mental imagery had a similar effect on their mood), the researchers found that mental imagery was significantly more effective. as a distraction than verbal thoughts.

“The use of mental imagery seems to help us enhance our affect, as well as regulate our nervous system,” Lawrence said. “The fact that we didn’t get a significant result for ruminating on imagery versus verbal thinking tells us that it doesn’t really matter what form those negative cognitions take. The part that seems really problematic is the getting stuck part: living over and over again on these sad or anxiety-inducing things that happen.

The researchers don’t know exactly why mental imagery is so effective, but they hypothesize that it’s because imagery is much more immersive and requires more effort, creating a stronger emotional response and greater distraction. There’s also some evidence that imagining mental images lights up the same part of the brain as seeing and experiencing those things in real life, Lawrence said.

In his work, Lawrence has found that some adults appear to ruminate in only one way, whereas most adolescents report ruminating on both verbal thoughts and mental images. One possibility is that these thought patterns become self-reinforcing habits, she said, with the negative images or verbal messages becoming more ingrained over time.

“That’s why I like working with adolescents: if we can interrupt these processes early in development, maybe we can help these adolescents reach adulthood and not get caught up in these negative thought patterns,” Lawrence said. “All of us ruminate. It’s a matter of how long we do it and what skills we have to stop when we want to.”