An integrative model of perseverative thinking

People spend most of their waking hours detached from external stimuli, remembering the past, foreseeing the future, imagining situations in which they did not attend or that have never existed, or, simply, thinking. Such a process is crucial for mental health. A common feature of many mental disorders is recurrent stress-related thoughts, the so-called ‘perseverative thinking’. In this review, we describe how perseverative thinking represents a dysfunctional self-regulatory strategy that maintains and increases the effects of mental suffering and arises from the maladaptive interplay between discrepancy monitoring, strategy selection, executive regulation, and information representation. We further argue that perseverative thinking can change how the mind represents the world through memory updating, resulting in an increased perceived need for regulation of the external and internal inputs. Lastly, we propose a new integrated model incorporating the different features of perseverative thinking, offering a more unified perspective on psychopathology.