Review articleConscious and unconscious perseverative cognition: Is a large part of prolonged physiological activity due to unconscious stress?
Section snippets
Stress and prolonged physiological activity
Psychological stress is a widespread problem and a substantial cause or co-determinant of organic disease (e.g., Ref. [1], [2]), presenting an ever-growing humanitarian and economic burden. For decades, this health risk has been explained by theorizing that stressful events are accompanied by increased physiological responses, which, if frequent and intense, may cause bodily harm. However, this “reactivity hypothesis” has received only some—and inconsistent—support [3], [4], [5], [6], [7], [8]
The role of continuing stressful thoughts: “Perseverative Cognition”
What causes the sustained physiological responses seen in laboratory and ambulatory studies? As yet, this fundamental question has rarely been addressed. We formulated the perseverative cognition hypothesis[10], which is based on two core arguments. The first is that slow recovery after stressors or the long anticipatory responses before stressors cannot be due to biological mechanisms alone. The physiological response to an average daily stressor is comparable to that of mild physical exercise
Unexplained prolonged activity: A role for unconscious perseverative cognition
One indication for a role for unconscious perseverative cognition came from our recent finding that in daily life, worry itself has prolonged physiological effects [26], again independent of mood and life style factors. In this study, we showed that up to two hours after worry episodes, autonomic activity was higher than in neutral episodes, independent of whether worrying went on or a new worry episode started. In fact, because of their statistical independence, the concurrent and prolonged
Experimental approaches to unconscious perseverative cognition
Evidence of health relevant physiological responses during subliminal threat-related stimulation would unambiguously support the hypothesis that unconscious negative emotional processes can have prolonged effects. To our current knowledge, there are only a few promising results: one accidental finding and one from a pilot study. Levy et al. [61] tested whether subliminal words in a backward masking paradigm related to either negative or positive stereotypes of aging presented to elderly
Concluding remarks
The domain of stress and health is currently facing a change of scope, from reactivity (during stressors) to prolonged activity (before[9], [10], [11] and after stressors [9], [10], [11], [12]). In our previous work, our group has promoted and studied prolonged activity and the mediating role of perseverative cognition [5], [9], [10], [11], [16], [17], [18], [25], such as worry, which previously has been largely overlooked by health psychologists. Some years ago we launched the ‘perseverative
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