Repetitive negative thinking associated with cognitive decline in older adults

https://bmcpsychiatry.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12888-025-06815-2

by redbell • 10 months ago

531 234 10 months ago

bmcpsychiatry.biomedcentral.com

rzzzt• 10 months ago

In... mice? Nay, this time it is adults over the age of 60.

dimensional_dan• 10 months ago

Oh man one more negative thing to worry about.

sindriava7• 10 months ago

10/10 exactly what people with these issues want to hear. Great thing to post OP!

geoduck14• 10 months ago

Can't people with these type of issues control what they think about?

Can't they have a go-to list of positive things to think about when they notice they are thinking negative thoughts?

IAmBroom3• 10 months ago

Short answer: no, you can't just "think positive" your way out of mental illness.

Also: Correlation is not causation; we don't know that avoiding these RNTs changes anything in the brain chemistry.

notmyjob8• 10 months ago

No, but you can think less by reducing your cognitive ability through say drugs and alcohol. Notice how the happiest boomers guzzle the wine and don’t have as many (negative) thoughts.

fwip• 10 months ago

It's not quite as simple as that, but what you describe has some relation to Cognitive Behavioral Therapy. Part of CBT involves recognizing when you're ruminating/spiraling in thought patterns that you want to avoid, and strategies to redirect and break that loop.

StefanBatory• 10 months ago

/r/thanksiamcured

lokar• 10 months ago

Don’t some religious seekers spend a lifetime trying to control what they think about (or don’t)?

dotnet00• 10 months ago

It's like how you can't really help but automatically read text you look at in a language you know well.

It's very hard to control, over the years I've worked on reigning in my negative thinking, but every once in a while I still end up in a spiral of increasingly negative thoughts that don't just go away by focusing on positive things.

timeinput2• 10 months ago

I can't.

I have a go to list of positive things to think about.

I have physical tactile things (a small rock I carry around) that brings me joy when I touch it because it reminds me of good times.

It is very easy for me to get stuck in negative thought loops, and no matter how many things I see / feel / hear / ... it doesn't get better (at least in the short term).

The question your asking to me is akin to "can't people control what they see" thinking it's like a movie you can choose to go and attend, when instead it's like "A Clockwork Orange" where in fact I do not get to control what I see.

sindriava7• 10 months ago

I think this question stems from a fundamental misunderstanding of how depression works for a lot of people. You're asking "why don't they replace negative signals with positive signals" when the problem often is that the positive signaling mechanism itself is broken. It's like trying to balance a bike that only goes left.

IAmBroom3• 10 months ago

So, hide the lamp under the basket because you don't want to see it?

kcoddington• 10 months ago

I'm not seeing where they are coming up with RNT as a cause, other than a lot of theory. Wouldn't it be a symptom of cognitive decline instead? Dementia patients, particularly those with Alzheimers, tend to become depressed because of confusion and memory loss. Wouldn't it be more likely that these depression symptoms are being caused by deteriotating brain function rather than the other way around?

IAmBroom3• 10 months ago

They don't claim it's a cause. In fact, they explicitly state more research is needed to determine the relationship.

pessimizer• 10 months ago

Of course. It would be bizarre if there weren't a relationship between Lewy Body dementia, Alzheimer's, or vascular dementia (which in old people, means you've gone into heart failure) and repetitive negative thoughts. For one, you know you've got an incurable disease that will inevitably destroy your mind, and you've become one of the rare class of people for which assisted suicide has almost no controversy, it's something you're putting down payments on. For two, you can't finish thoughts.

My father was just diagnosed with Parkinson's a few months ago, and he already has trouble following any conversation, and knows it. If that didn't lead to depression, that's what would be notable. And any insight that he reaches that gives him comfort might be gone an hour later.

It just seems like a silly study.

BriggyDwiggs42• 10 months ago

Wait down payments? Is that metaphorical? How much does that cost?

giantg2• 10 months ago

I believe there have been other studies showing people with a history of depression develop dementia at higher rates. There are some that have shown the structural/signal changes that happen after longterm depression as well. These are things that occur years or decades before the dementia.

Jabrov• 10 months ago

No one’s saying anything about it being a cause though … association is not cause

cenamus• 10 months ago

Several comments already seem to assume that already though

awesome_dude6• 10 months ago

This is the problem of correlation being reported in media, people read it as "causation found"

When really it's "We've found an interesting association, and we are going to explore it more to see if there's an causation that we can influence"

osn9363739• 10 months ago

I think they need to use a different word than associated. That's what's causing the confusion?

xattt• 10 months ago

The first thing that jumps out at me is the concept of perseveration (repeated fixed obsessions) that happens in dementia syndromes. It would be interesting to consider whether this is a chicken-or-egg scenario, whether individuals tended to ruminate in earlier life.

nertirs1• 10 months ago

True, but it still might be a good proxy to estimate how well a client is doing.

47282847• 10 months ago

Gwern on correlation and causation: https://gwern.net/correlation

cowpig• 10 months ago

RNT was assessed using the perseverative thinking questionnaire (PTQ). The scale consists of 15 items covering three domains: core characteristics of RNT, unproductiveness, and psychological capacity captured. Each item is rated on a 5-point Likert scale from 0 “never” to 4 “almost always”, with a total score ranging from 0 to 60.

Can someone who works in this field explain to me how this study is anything other than evidence of one exam being a proxy for another?

The "Repetitive Negative Thinking" is then just, like, a marketing term for their questionnaire?

I don't see the questionnaire itself in the study (maybe I'm missing it?). Without understanding what questions were answered in a questionnaire, how am I supposed to take anything away from this study?

notmyjob8• 10 months ago

“The prevalence of cognitive disorders is increasing year by year, placing a heavy burden on patients, families, and society. It is estimated that the total annual cost of dementia disease in China will reach $1.89 trillion in 2050 [4]. However, there is no drug that can stop or reverse the progression of dementia.”

That is my own RNT. If only there were a way to escape from this reality. Death, taxes and global population collapse while a huge proportion of the voting population loses their ability to do basic tasks while still clinging to political hegemony in the nations they destroy. What a great time to be alive.

adamwong2464• 10 months ago

It's common for old fogies to claim that the future is bad and the past was best. But I don't remember a time in my life that was this stressful. I really do think the world is getting crazier, dumber, and just all around worse, this past decade most specifically. It seems the world has decided to just go nuts, shift into overdrive and metaphorically drive off a cliff. Everybody wants to escape the real world and live through their screens. Nothing is real and everything is a meme. And the fact that we allowed DJT to even approach the White House is such a damning indictment of America and it's vaunted democracy. The bad guys won, and there's no clear way to change that.

notmyjob8• 10 months ago

For many nations, DJT has been the best thing that has ever happened, by a wide indisputable margin. Not all nations, but some.

hackable_sand• 10 months ago

And here I am in camp "it's always been this way".

All the older generations found ways through. We'll find ways through.

shortcord• 10 months ago

+100 million people died in war in the 20th century. Not to mention preventable famines, etc.

Increase your time horizons to see things aren’t even close to as bad as they can be. Our lifetimes are a vapor.

YesBox2• 10 months ago

IMO… You need to detach yourself from the big data straw you’re gagging on.

Go outside and interact with people.

There is enough “content” IRL or otherwise on this planet that is immeasurably beyond a single person experiencing that affords you the opportunity to choose the life you can live.

Teach yourself how to choose

Theodores• 10 months ago

The bad guys might seem to have won but the story isn't over yet!

The screen thing has been going on for a century or more, whether that be the nonsense we have now or the nonsense we had when TV ruled the world, or the silver-screen before that.

Arguably the aftermath of 9/11 was crazier than what we have now, before that we had the joys of the Cold War, before that WW2 and, before that WW1. Right now, we still have whole cities getting razed off the map, but, in the WW2 days that was a daily occurence.

Everything must be destroyed for there to be a 'new ark'. This is the story with many a religion, and many a religion was founded in 'end times', hence there is this common eschatology. Normally there is some heaven-sent messiah character that magically fixes all the problems caused by man by undocumented means as part of this story. We even have some fundamentalists that want to blow up the world just to bring on this scenario, and you can't reason with these people.

The parties of the left and the right have died intellectually in the West. DJT is in the White House ruling by decree and tweet right now, which we can deal with. However, the Democrats and the Republicans are both as dead as a dodo, with it being the same in the USA's mini-me, the UK, where both Labour and the Conservatives are finished.

The secret services have successfully managed to nip in the bud anything that could be an alternative, in particular any eco-friendly save-the-earth ideology. That was easy for them to do, they just had to infiltrate whatever was going and present those guys as crazy. For an example, look at what happened to 'Extinction Rebellion' - they went extinct.

It is glass half-empty or glass half-full, and, if you want to look at it positively, the decks are getting well and truly cleared for something new, and the new does not necessarily mean a choice between a Hitler, a DJT, a benevolent dictator, Skynet or whomever the promised messiah is.

There are plenty of countries that have lived through terrible times to come out of it with a sensible grown adult taking the leadership role. I am loathed to provide examples of that because anyone that lifts millions out of poverty will be negatively portrayed in Western media, but there are examples today in Africa, South America and Asia.

However, one example I can give you is that of the post-war UK. Despite everything being destroyed, the post war Labour government built the health service, built the schools, built the houses and got the country back on its feet, with the accomplishments recognised by those today on both the left and the right. Sure, it has been decline all the way since then, but the bad guys didn't win and there was a 'new ark'.

Trust the process. The post 9/11 repetitive negative thinking, when every day had a colour-coded terror alert level led to moral and cognitive decline, with this excellent situation where left-right Western politics is dead, which is where we want to be for the new.

AngryData• 10 months ago

I don't think its getting especially dumber and crazier now, but more like we let dumb and crazy fester and let the problems keep building for decades while we used technological progress as a distraction from it all and an excuse to do as little as possible. People started believing technological progress will fix everything and that 30 years down the live they will be living like the Jetsons with personal butler robots so that the problems of today don't matter, except it didn't happen, and will continue to not happen, and problems continue to mount.

alexjplant• 10 months ago

I really do think the world is getting crazier, dumber, and just all around worse, this past decade most specifically. It seems the world has decided to just go nuts, shift into overdrive and metaphorically drive off a cliff.

At the turn of the last century 80 percent of the world was illiterate. In just a few generations the average Westerner has gone from subsistence farming to living in a nigh-indestructible air-conditioned box littered with supercomputers that let them transact financially and socially with billions of people around the world. We're living in completely uncharted territory and it isn't a huge leap to speculate that human brains aren't adapted for modern society. A few hundred years ago the average person's attention was devoted to pulling turnips out of the ground and hugging their family; now they must contend with high finance, complicated machinery, ever-evolving fashion and social mores, etc. The proliferation of smartphones and algorithmically-curated entertainment are merely accelerants of this trend.

Of course one must take the good with the bad. I'd rather have cool music and exotic cuisine than live in a lean-to in the woods, so my solution is twofold: I aggressively curate my interactions with media (no socials, no traditional news outlets, etc) and always try to keep in mind that most people in this world don't do this and are therefore in a constant state of cognitive exhaustion. When you consider how much more shit the average person has to deal with these days their negative behaviors suddenly become a lot more understandable.

I'm optimistic that the current wave of dopamine depletion pop pseudo-science will lead to substantial changes in our society's media literacy but that remains to be seen.

nradov3• 10 months ago

This is unironically the best time to be alive. The problem is that most people are ignorant of real history and don't realize how much life used to suck. Everything is amazing right now and nobody is happy.

adamwong2464• 10 months ago

Yes, it's an absurd situation for so many to be so unhappy when, by all measurements, this is "the best time to be alive. But do you really think that Americans are simply that spoiled and stupid? When an entire nation sinks into a despair, surely there must be a better answer than "ignorance"? So I am positing that there must be some underlying problem, something that is difficult to quantify, dare I say it, some kind of mass psychological-spiritual disfunction at play.

an0malous• 10 months ago

Most would agree the 21st century is better than the 16th century, but is 2025 better than 2019 or even 2010?

kelipso• 10 months ago

If you have a lot of money, sure. But coming back to reality, prices for everything has risen and lots of people are living harder lives than a few years ago.

bendigedig• 10 months ago

If you're well off economically, then maybe.

But outside of the freedom in how you spend whatever money you are able to 'earn', I'd argue that the Western model of life (i.e. work) is pretty damn authoritarian. It's entirely possible that people in the past felt that they had more freedom than they realistically do now.

edit: To the coward who down-voted me without deigning to engage in debate, here's some evidence that when empires (like the west) collapse it can improve the lives of the 99%: https://aeon.co/essays/the-great-myth-of-empire-collapse

notmyjob8• 10 months ago

If you ignore future developments that seem impossible to avoid, I’m talking demographics mostly, then you might have an argument.

ctoll2• 10 months ago

There is no meaningful 'best time to be alive' distinct from psychological reality. If people are not adapted to their environment and either don't value it or aren't valued by it, it doesn't matter how much material comfort is available. There is a reason the suicide rate jumps during industrial revolutions.

hliyan2• 10 months ago

I have a personal theory (I'm sure it's not a novel one and it probably has a name) that human brains are naturally predisposed to negative thought than positive thought because our brains are essentially evolved prediction engines. And because it is often easier and faster to lose something than gain it (e.g. it is usually less urgent to act on the signs of deer you might want to hunt and eat, than the sign of a tiger who might want to hunt and eat you), our prediction engines have a bias toward negative prediction. Conscious awareness of this fact (or rather, theory) has helped me curb negative thoughts at least to some extent.

euroderf• 10 months ago

it is often easier and faster to lose something than gain it

And things that add to entropy are favored by nature, undoing human labor & endeavor. Related?

growingkittens6• 10 months ago

I know that traumatized human brains tend toward negativity. I don't believe it is a natural human condition, though. With trauma, the instincts you mentioned start applying to the wrong situations - trauma rewires the brain. "Minor" trauma, sustained trauma, traumatic events, can all contribute to this.

sindriava7• 10 months ago

This is likely a byproduct of us being too comfortable now. Not in the "you've got nothing real to worry about!" boomer rethoric kind of way, but in the sense that our baseline for reward has shifted a bit higher. So trauma can still present a very strong negative RL signal, while positive RL signals of similar magnitude become rarer.

moooo993• 10 months ago

I don‘t think negativity necessarily has something to do with trauma. Negativity bias is very widespread, regardless of previous trauma. Basically everybody flies at negativity.

Bad and shocking headlines click way better than positive ones, negative feedback is occupying our attention more than positive feedback, we perceive losses way more important than gains, we perceive losses as way more impactful than gains of the same degree, etc.

I am 100% sure trauma can and does affect the negativity aspect of our thinking in a big way. But I do not think that negative thinking overtopping positive thinking is limited to trauma sufferers

sindriava7• 10 months ago

I agree with this to a large extent. All prediction comes with uncertainty and a good survival strategy is to align towards the upper bound on risk and lower bound on reward.

ninetyninenine11• 10 months ago

First of all if negative thinking is associated with cognitive decline and if what you say is also generally true then humans will also be pretty much, in general, be in cognitive decline.

Humans all being generally in a state of cognitive decline doesn’t make sense from an evolutionary perspective because natural selection will weed out degraded cognitive performance. So most people won’t be in this state. Anecdotally, you likely don’t see all your friends in cognitive decline so likely most of them don’t have a negative bias.

So your conclusion is likely to not be true. In fact I’m being generous here. Your conclusion is startling and obviously wrong both from a scientific perspective and an anecdotal one.

In fact the logic from this experiment and additionally many many other psychological studies points to the opposite. Humans naturally have a positive bias for things. People lie to themselves to stay sane.

Anecdotally what I observed is people don’t like to be told they are wrong. They don’t like to be told they are fat and overweight slobs. Additionally stupid people by all objective standards exist but practically every culture on earth has rules about directly calling someone a dumbass even if it’s the truth.

Like this is not a minor thing if I violate these positive cognitive biases with hard truths it will indeed cause a visceral and possibly violent reaction from most people who want to maintain that positive cognitive bias.

For example racial equality. Black people in America are in general taller and stronger than say Asians. It’s a general truth. You can’t deny this. Strength and height has an obvious genetic basis putting equality from a physical standpoint to be untrue. It is objective reality that genetics makes Asians weaker and smaller than black people in America.

So genetics effects things like size between races, it even effects things like size between species… black people are bigger than mouses. But you know what else? it affects intelligence between species. So mice genetically are less intelligent than black people and also black people are genetically more intelligent than fish. So what am I getting at here?

Genetics affects hair color, physicality, height, skin color between races. Genetics also effects intelligence between species (you are more intelligent than a squirrel) but by some black magic this narrow area of intelligence between races say Asians and black people… it doesn’t exist. Does this make sense to you? Is this logical? Genetics changes literally everything between species and races but it just tip toes around intelligence leaving it completely equal? Is all intelligence really just from the environment when everything else isn’t?

I mean at the very least the logic points to something that can be debated and discussed but this is not an open topic because it violates our cognitive biases.

Some of you are thinking you’re above it. Like you see what I’m getting at and you think you can escape the positive bias. I assure you that you can’t escape it, likely you’re only able to escape it because you’re not black. If you were black there’s no way what I said is acceptable.

But I’m Asian. How come I can accept the fact that I’m shorter and weaker than black people? Maybe it’s because height is too obvious of a metric that we can’t escape it and intelligence isn’t as obvious in the sense that I can’t just look at someone and know how smart he is.

But let’s avoid the off topic tangent here about racial intelligence and get back to my point. I know this post will be attacked but this was not my intention. I need to trigger a visceral reaction in order for people to realize how powerful positive cognitive bias is. That’s my point. It is frighteningly powerful and it’s also frighteningly evident but mass delusion causes us to be blind to it. Seriously don’t start a debate on racial intelligence. Stick to the point: positive cognitive bias.

Humans as a species that viscerally and violently bias in the cognitively positive direction.

Parent poster could not be more wrong. We are delusional and we lie to ourselves to shield ourselves from the horrors of the real world. It is so powerful that we will resort to attacks and even violence to maintain our cognitively positive delusions.

jncfhnb12• 10 months ago

There’s not much evidence of rigorous differences in intelligence across racial groups that could not be explained by environmental and cultural differences. Statistical analysis generally suggests that if there is one, the effect size is small.

The current observed gap is much smaller than gains than have been observed within racial communities over time as a result of environmental changes.

So… no. You don’t have a lot of credible evidence for what you claim is a delusion to doubt. And even the observed effect size disregarding confounding effects is less than individual variation.

cyberax2• 10 months ago

There are studies on separated Black twins that ended up in different socioeconomic situations. They limit the genetic difference in variation of IQ between races to just a few points.

And to be clear, IQ itself is very much inheritable. But the _variation_ in IQ in a population is not explained by genetics.

theptip• 10 months ago

Sounds like “loss aversion”, which was studied by Kahneman and Tversky.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loss_aversion

kevin_thibedeau• 10 months ago

Negative statements also garner more attention from the tribe. This is why a lot of special interest groups are constantly carping about what they're against rather than what they're for.

gxs2• 10 months ago

This makes perfect sense

People forget that nature only optimizes for sexual reproduction and that’s pretty much it

In this case for example, it doesn’t really give a shit about your psychological well being or shaving years off your life because of some negative thought pattern

If being on your toes, anxious, paranoid, and always looking over your shoulder keeps you alive and making babies - then as far as the developer that nature is, it’s a feature not a bug

jncfhnb12• 10 months ago

People forget that nature only optimizes for sexual reproduction and that’s pretty much it

Common misunderstanding.

Evolution optimizes for system success. Not individual gene propagation. Genomes are not agents with individual goals.

Many species, but especially social animals, have numerous behaviors and traits designed to prompt communal success rather than individual survival and reproduction

keybored• 10 months ago

Evolutionary psychology just-so stories can justify anything as long as the premise that the organism will survive better in some defined local optimum is preserved.

HarHarVeryFunny• 10 months ago

It seems to be an established fact that humans are loss averse, and feel the pain of a loss more than the pleasure of a gain. This seems to make sense from an evolutionary point of view - taking a risk to gain something, at the expense of losing something already in hand, seems generally maladaptive (perhaps moreso when you are old and frail, and less resilient to loss).

Perhaps this translates into a tendency to dwell on the negatives of a situation rather than the potential benefits?

OTOH the human mind seems to fail in common ways when old age and dementia sets in, perhaps with no benefit, so this may just be one of those things. Old people tend to have bad joints. News at 11.

77pt77• 10 months ago

Losses can be fatal and irreversible but gains almost never are irreversible.

Just another fundamental asymmetry in existence.

untrimmed• 10 months ago

Is it possible that we're just better at reporting our negative thoughts, not that we have more of them? Or is overthinking the price we pay for analyzing everything?

EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK• 10 months ago

I think there is not a single person on Earth without repetitive negative thoughts.

FullKirby• 10 months ago

Vaguely related video on a similar topic : https://youtu.be/tfbM6vYsW9g?si=yfZ3WQ9iHB2rNnba

b112• 10 months ago

No, it's correlation not causation. When you get older, you see everyone making the same damn mistakes you made, but refusing to listen to you. Various reasons are given as to "No, this is different", but it isn't.

Then, worse, you remember yourself saying "No, this is different", and how wrong you were, and it kinda bums you out a bit. You're watching a replay of yourself being a dumbass, which makes you angry at the situation.

That doesn't mean every old person is negatively inclined, because some will think "Well, this is the way of it", and take solace in that fact that it's been happening since at least the start of recorded history. You, and your ancestors are one. And you finally get your grandparents.

So even the optimists, feeling better, think "might as well play my part" then yell "get off my lawn!"

sieste• 10 months ago

the participants in the Q3 and Q4 groups exhibited lower cognition scores (Q3:β = -0.180, 95%CI -2.849~-0.860; Q4:β = -0.164, 95% -2.611~-0.666)

This seems wrong. If "β" is the estimate here (not sure), it should be inside the confidence interval, but is way outside...

Paracompact• 10 months ago

Beta is dimensionless, in terms of standard deviations. In their results tables, you can find their unit versions under the column "B". These lie in the centers of the CIs, as expected.

Jakap• 10 months ago

What about just talking gibberish in your mind? https://studyfinds.org/buddhist-meditation-christian-tongues...

Sammi• 10 months ago

Anecdotally: Happy people seem to like to talk about anything and everything. Unhappy people don't like to talk or only talk about one thing.

I just got inspired on an llm prompt, and got these three koans, that to me are the most amazing things I've been able to get out of llms so far: https://pastebin.com/tc9uMWuw

Thank you for the set up.

nomorewords• 10 months ago

I wonder if this is how daydreaming helps, especially as a kid. I think that being taught not to dream as much as an adult and being in the moment kind of removes this random focus in our brains

endofreach• 10 months ago

"Ah, the good old days... when we weren't this dumb"

moab9• 10 months ago

Repetitive negative thinking associated WITH EVERYTHING.

nicce• 10 months ago

Does someone have a medicine for negative thinking?

motbus3• 10 months ago

Quite hard these days to be positive:/

adamhartenz• 10 months ago

Prozac

Blahah• 10 months ago

Loss, humility, service. And the most important: community.

kinnth• 10 months ago

meditation.

strken• 10 months ago

Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) and Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) are effective at reducing negative thinking, although they don't come in pill form.

herval• 10 months ago

Pretty much any antidepressant or anxiolytic

ScottBurson• 10 months ago

Dark chocolate.

dgfitz• 10 months ago

A gramme a day…

phist_mcgee• 10 months ago

Take a look at stoicism. Not the pop modern version but the ancient roman and greek traditions of Seneca, Epictitus, and Marcus Aurelius.

Essentially letting go of controlling our lives in ways that cause suffering. Accepting that bad things can and do happen. Realising that life is temporary and we should focus ourselves on things in our power that make us a person of better character. Everything else is out of our control and should be accepted without judgement.

It's brought a lot of comfort to me over the years.

catigula• 10 months ago

Yes, there is medicine for negative thinking that helps to various degrees (SSRIs do work), but they have issues and unfortunately we don't have any magic bullets.

somenameforme6• 10 months ago

Have children. Hard not to endlessly smile when you see their smiles for you doing nothing more than being there for them. Then, uhh I guess the plan is to have more children once they enter their teen years?

Weight lifting also helps with mentality in a million different ways.

toomuchtodo• 10 months ago

https://www.psypost.org/psilocybin-therapy-linked-to-lasting...

https://doi.org/10.1556/2054.2025.00461

portaouflop• 10 months ago

Disco

awesome_dude6• 10 months ago

Stop being so negative maaaaan

raxxorraxor2• 10 months ago

Perhaps the author should think more positively about negative thinking.

01100011• 10 months ago

Why is this getting so many upvotes? Are anxious techies reading the headline and thinking they're in the beginnings of cognitive decline because they have thoughts they feel are more negative than they should have? Relax folks...

lutusp3• 10 months ago

"Repetitive negative thinking (RNT) is a core symptom of a number of common psychological disorders and may be a modifiable process shared by many psychological risk factors that contribute to the development of cognitive impairment." (emphasis added)

This strongly implies that changing negative thinking behavior might reduce cognitive impairment. But the study has no way to establish a cause-effect relationship -- that would require an entirely different kind of study, one that studies the brain, not the mind. In other words, a neuroscience study, one probably not possible at present.

Like many psychology papers, this one implies a cause-effect relationship that isn't supported by the evidence, but one that suggests a role for talk therapy.

It would be interesting to see a review of all modern psychological work, a hundred years from now, from the perspective of a neuroscience that doesn't yet exist, to see how often these articles turned out to be just-so stories with no connection to reality.

A similar finding is that kids who smoke marijuana are likely to experience serious mental health issues later on -- that's indisputable. The problem is the same as in this case -- people assume a cause-effect relationship that isn't supported by the evidence. Maybe kids predisposed to mental health issues are more likely to use marijuana -- that possibility can't be excluded because all the studies are retrospective.

Most people know I can be relied on to make this point, but until neuroscience matures, studies like this will suffer from a theory vacuum. One can only accomplish so much by studying symptoms, with no clue about root biological causes.

Aurornis2• 10 months ago

A similar finding is that kids who smoke marijuana are likely to experience serious mental health issues later on -- that's indisputable. The problem is the same as in this case -- people assume a cause-effect relationship that isn't supported by the evidence.

This is one of those topics where people will set an impossibly high standard for evidence and then use that to reject everything.

We do actually know that heavy marijuana use is associated with increases of mental health conditions. We know that discontinuing heavy use can result in improvements in depression scores over time (following the withdrawal periods which, yes, exists despite decades of people claiming it doesn’t). We know that the increased availability of high concentration THC products has made it worse.

Yet if you want to set your threshold for evidence so high that nothing short of a large scale RCT will answer the question you can ignore all of this, because such an RCT will never be produced for obvious ethical reasons.

This pattern is common in topics where people simple don’t want to believe a casual relationship might exist. I knew a guy who started believing that there isn’t any strong evidence that flossing or even twice-daily brushing were important because he didn’t think the science proved causation that flossing and brushing improved dental health. He believed it was just correlation and people who were healthier in general were also flossing and brushing, coincidentally. His breath was terrible and he later abandoned those ideas when the dental problems undeniably arrived.

lutusp3• 10 months ago

Yet if you want to set your threshold for evidence so high that nothing short of a large scale RCT will answer the question you can ignore all of this, because such an RCT will never be produced for obvious ethical reasons.

Yes, but this means existing studies can't be relied on to justify a conclusion that would have required the impossible study. Saying that a study isn't practical can't be used to justify making a policy decision based on circumstantial evidence.

My use of marijuana studies is meant only to show how bad science steers public policy, not to advocate for its use. There are other, better reasons to avoid that drug.

This pattern is common in topics where people simple don’t want to believe a casual relationship might exist.

This is why science exists. But if the science cannot be carried out, then we have no right to draw conclusions that would require actual science to be legitimate.

This is moving away from the original topic, which is the kind of sloppy science common in modern psychology, where people wave their hands instead of their scientific results.

I knew a guy who ...

A red herring, but I think you knew that.

t0lo2• 10 months ago

Looks like we're in for further mass cognitive decline given the state of the world then. Cheery.

bogdan• 10 months ago

Don't be so negative.

t0lo2• 10 months ago

Hard not to be negative when you're 22 and have firsthand knowledge of how emotionally and intellectually stunted the coming generation is, and how much you've lost out on.

narrator• 10 months ago

The reverse causation here is obvious. It's perfectly normal to be depressed about losing one's cognitive faculties.

LorenPechtel• 10 months ago

And even if it isn't depression per se it might very well be a symptom of the mind starting to slip.

bloomingeek• 10 months ago

Realizing there are many variables in life, I'll chime in. I'm in my late sixties and catch myself everyday complaining to myself. Things are harder to do, my memory isn't shot, but is not quite as sharp and the old body is, well, not as responsive.

Having said all this, I don't let it get to me because I knew all this was coming as I became more "senior". All things being even, we do have the power to control our thoughts and should. Hope is a much overlooked word these days. People we know, family and not looking for trouble can help us stay hopeful. Unfortunately not everyone has family or their living condition may not be ideal, this is when community is very helpful. If I may say, if you know an older person who you wonder about, ask them what's going on.

Dumblydorr• 10 months ago

We can’t control our thoughts though, right? They just pop up, appearing randomly. We can control our attention and train ourselves not to get onboard trains of thought though. But I think it’s important to acknowledge thoughts randomly crop up and it’s not our fault.

natnatenathan• 10 months ago

My personal belief is that we can’t control every thought, but we can make sure we’re in a positive feedback loop instead of a negative one. For example, when I am getting negative, I’ve learned to take a step back and try to figure out why. If I can’t get myself in a better mood, I go to bed early and generally wake up happier. I also try to structure my days to make time for the things that make me happier (exercise, eating well, friends, family, hobbies) and cut out things that make me feel more negative (social media, news, sugar, etc). Not perfect, but it helps.

andy_ppp• 10 months ago

Just skimmed the paper but isn't it just as likely cognitive decline caused the negative thinking?

jamiek88• 10 months ago

They say is associated with. Not is caused by. More research needed. Could be cause or correlation.

bryanrasmussen• 10 months ago

cognitive decline is also associated with stress. So if you have a lot of stress in your life you will probably suffer cognitive decline. Also if you have a lot of stress in your life you will probably be a pretty negative person.

Nevermark• 10 months ago

I already knew my best friend from childhood was a terminal cynical bastard.

But now this! He has less time than I thought. I will have to forward it to him, and cross my fingers that he doesn't spiral. Thoughts and prayers, man. Before you suggest it, I can't tell him to just "think positive". He would physically explode. Implode? Something. Matter, antimatter.

lukan• 10 months ago

"think positive"

To be honest, I don't think that line ever helped someone who sees himself in the middle of deep shit. There is nothing positive about being in shit. The only thing that can help people stuck in such a mindset is somehow change their perspective. And yes, maybe that study will help in a way.

jajko• 10 months ago

Its like saying "Just say no" to drugs once you are deep down some freebase crack addiction. Effin' clueless spit in the face

qazxcvbnmlp• 10 months ago

usually cynicism is a coping mechanism for underlying/subconscious pain... If you resolve that, then there is room for happier/positive thoughts to emerge. However, it's just like any other addiction (alcohol), it's not resolved in a day and takes hard work.

Much more comfortable to think; (everything sucks, those in power are out to get me) than (wow I really had a high hope for what my life would be, and this sure isn't it).

modeless• 10 months ago

I recently saw this quote that I think is applicable:

"I've noticed a very strong correlation between being very bad at predicting the future, and worrying a lot about the future"

bradley13• 10 months ago

Causation or correlation?

Noticing your own cognitive decline is bound to be depressing.

perlgeek4• 10 months ago

Repetitive negative thinking (RNT) is a core symptom of a number of common psychological disorders and may be a modifiable process shared by many psychological risk factors that contribute to the development of cognitive impairment.

The core assumption (or insight?) of Cognitive Therapy (and Cognitive Behavioral Therapy) is that our thoughts shape the way we feel. In this model, repetitive negative thoughts are actually a main cause of depression, not a symptom.

If you're interested in this approach, I'd recommend the works of David Burns, for example his book "Feeling Great" or the Feeling Good Podcast.

moooo993• 10 months ago

In this model, repetitive negative thoughts are actually a main cause of depression, not a symptom.

Wouldn‘t it be both? While the repeated negative thoughts are the cause, they‘re also the symptom how it show up and the reason why people seek out a diagnosis

perlgeek4• 10 months ago

Yes. "not just a symptom" would have been more accurate.

thorio2• 10 months ago

I came here to say: read this book, it's really great.

I think if your depression is very deeply buried, it surely isn't enough to read it, but still it can open up quit some insights regarding the connection of what you think and how you feel. It makes it visible.

There can also be other causes for depression is course.

While studying and testing the exercises described in the book I discovered one other thing I'd like to share: to me it seems, to come out of a reappearing mental dip, you need to be very consistent in your efforts (mental / physical exercises and other habits you try to establish or change, to feel better). Anyone else?

raxxorraxor2• 10 months ago

This can surely be corrected with the happiness laser.

Jokes aside, it should be noted that CBT might confuse cause and effect and the goal is to mold the behavior of people into something socially wanted or expected or just learn to live with something that cannot reasonably be changed.

perlgeek4• 10 months ago

it should be noted that CBT might confuse cause and effect

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/feeling-good/202503/... explicitly discusses the arrow of causality here

and the goal is to mold the behavior of people into something socially wanted or expected or just learn to live with something that cannot reasonably be changed.

There are lots of crackpot approaches to psychotherapy, but I do believe that most therapists genuinely want to help patients/clients to recover, not just mold them into something socially accepted.

baxuz• 10 months ago

I've had little success with multiple CBT therapists as it's basically "have you tried not feeling bad" with extra steps.

"Things are only as bad as we perceive them to be" leading up to "have you tried reframing that and finding something positive in it", and "have you tried not thinking about that".

If I need dissociation and self-delusion, there are substances that are a far more impactful option.

asacrowflies• 10 months ago

I'm glad I'm not alone in this. They tried to say it was my " engineer brain" making me miserable.... But as a super autistic adult...the only comfort in this world is objective math and scientific truths.

Amaury-El• 10 months ago

I saw this with a family member. In their 60s, they started getting stuck on small worries and always assumed the worst. At first it just seemed like anxiety, but over time their memory and focus started slipping too. It was like their mind got stuck in a loop.

What helped the most wasn’t medicine. It was little things, like going for walks together or having simple conversations. Just giving the brain something new to pay attention to seemed to make a real difference.

thorio2• 10 months ago

This is in my family too. One person always had a tendency of being overly worried and after children moved out and social life thinned or a bit, this became more prevalent.

After years of trying to push that person towards trying out new things and enriching their life, I kind of gave up. You simply cannot convince someone about a medicine if they don't feel there is a problem. Still it's hard to see believing the person could be enjoying life more, especially during their retirement.

mdavid626• 10 months ago

You can’t make someone change, if they don’t want to.

This can be very sad. The person you love just fades away.

perlgeek4• 10 months ago

Another little thing you can try: music from their childhood / youth.

Just yesterday I randomly came across a song we often heard in our shared apartment during University, and immediately I had 10 different memories from that time swirling around in my head.

pixl973• 10 months ago

Hmm, I wonder if things like algorithm driven social media is causing a huge amount of cognitive decline?

lojban• 10 months ago

The kids call it brainrot for a reason.

QuantumNoodle• 10 months ago

I don't have any hard evidence but being fed polarizing, click bait-y headlines that drive engagement through emotion certainly don't help. Fear is drummed up in a relative of mine from the headlines for articles (that they doom scroll past and don't read).

aborsy• 10 months ago

How do politicians and people in the business world maintain a normal life?

There are constant attacks, backstabbing, sues, etc.

lm28469• 10 months ago

They mostly don't, that's why they look 10+ years older than they are and are stressed as fuck

jraby3• 10 months ago

At least in business, this isn't really true. It makes more sense to form long term partnerships by being trustworthy than to have a reputation of hostility and lawsuits.

leke• 10 months ago

Repetitive negative thinking was a symptom of my undiagnosed ADHD. Getting diagnosed and medicated took away the repetitive negative thinking, or as I called it ruminating negative thought patterns.

wkat42424• 10 months ago

I really wish I could get diagnosed too. My psychiatrist refuses to even consider it because she says with my psych history as a kid they'd have identified it. But that's nonsense because thinking some adhd has changed hugely since the 80s. You needed to be rain man to be seen as autistic. And adhd was only diagnosed for loud obnoxious kids. My psychiatrist is also very old and kinda clings to those definitions.

But because of this I'm locked out of medication :'(

I'm very typical of both though. AuDHD.

dubegerrie• 10 months ago

After my PD diagnosis, I started out taking only Azilect, then Mirapex and sinemet as the disease progressed but didn’t help much. In July last year, I started on PD-5 TREATMENT PROTOCOL from www. Uinehealthcentre. com. Few months into the treatment, I made a significant recovery. After I completed the recommended treatment plan, almost all my symptoms were gone, had wonderful improvement with my movement and tremors . Its been 6 months since I completed the treatment, I live a better life..

LargoLasskhyfv• 10 months ago

This is why ignorance is bliss! If you can afford it. Mix in some stoicism and meditation, do some 'reality checks' every once in a while to not totally 'lose it', and life is good. If you can afford it. Otherwise? Bad luck. Still try that stoicism and meditation thing. Cats or other pets can help. Good sex too. Drugs? Just maybe.

AbstractH24• 10 months ago

Chicken, egg, or correlation without causation?

[and/]or, a contributing factor to the rightward shift of Western society?

jurschreuder• 10 months ago

Almost as if people who have a better life are happier, if you believe this study it almost seems like feelings are somehow related to the external world

mbrochh• 10 months ago

This sounds bogus.

What if something else causes negative thinking and then in the long run cognitive decline...

...like... eating excessive amounts of carbs and seed oils while also having a sedentary lifestyle and no exposure to the sun.

Repetitive negative thinking associated with cognitive decline in older adults

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