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'Sticky thinking' hampers decisions in depression

New study finds rumination can cause those with depression to get ‘stuck’ on thoughts, limiting their ability to mentally juggle options available to them when making decisions.

Firstly, they gave 124 candidate participants a questionnaire that assessed their level of depressive symptoms, and another that asked not only about how often they ruminated, but how difficult they found it to stop — the pair termed this 'sticky thinking'. A total of 21 participants who had scored relatively highly for sticking thinking and 19 who had ranked relatively low then spent ten minutes writing about a negative topic that had been bothering them in their daily lives. When the researchers looked at the EEG data, they also found that periods of sticky thinking were accompanied by an increase in alpha wave activity, which has been linked in earlier work to daydreaming and an unfocused mental state.

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