Publications
Stay up to date with The Calming Minds Project
Many of those involved in The Calming Minds Project have backgrounds in psychology, psychiatry, and cognitive behavioural therapies. Here, you can find links to various research papers co-authored by some team members and new findings emerging from the project.
Whether you’re a fellow researcher, a student, a healthcare professional, or just curious to learn more, these articles and summaries offer a deeper understanding of overthinking, worry, and rumination and their impact on practical mental health treatment and prevention.
Publications
Finding Flow: Cultivating Flow States as a Counterpoint to Depressive Rumination
Henrietta Roberts, Nicholas Moberly, Katie Wood, Sabrina Meechem, Sarah O’Rourke, Martin Howard, Ed Watkins
What’s it about?
This narrative review conceptualizes the cultivation of flow experiences as an emotion regulation strategy that acts as a counterpoint to rumination with promise for the prevention and treatment of depression. We first define rumination and flow. We then review the theoretical and empirical literature examining the relationship between rumination and flow states. We present a novel model that characterizes the phenomenology of flow as a counterpoint to rumination, focusing on elucidating shared and antagonistic dimensions. Finally, we identify key attentional, affective, motivational, and behavioral mechanisms by which the cultivation of flow states might act as an emotion regulation strategy to reduce susceptibility to rumination and explore implications for the treatment of rumination
Ecological Momentary Assessment Findings
Joanna Hunsmann, Dr Julia Funk, Professor Thomas Ehring
Pre-trial Findings from LMU
As part of the Calming Minds Project, we conducted a series of pilot studies to better understand how rumination and worry are experienced in everyday life.
Traditional questionnaires assessing this typically ask people to report on their thinking patterns in general. While valuable, these measures cannot capture how worry or rumination vary between situations and over time. In our pilot studies, participants reported on their momentary thoughts, feelings, and situational contexts repeatedly across several days. This allowed us to assess worry and rumination as they naturally occur in daily life.
By linking worry and rumination to specific contexts, we moved beyond assessing overall frequency or general distress and were able to identify situations in which worry and rumination tend to intensify. In doing so, we gained a more detailed understanding of how worry and rumination unfold in real-world settings. The insights from these pilot studies informed the design of the Calming Minds Study.
Let’s Talk about CBT- Practice Matters
with Rachel Handley for BABCP
Rumination and Depression with Professor Ed Watkins
Show Notes
In this episode, Rachel Handley talks with Professor Ed Watkins, Professor of Psychology at the University of Exeter a world-leading expert in Rumination and its impact on mental health and wellbeing. Professor Watkins talks about Rumination-Focussed Cognitive Therapy, an evidence-based approach he has developed and trialled to target these specific processes in depression.
They discuss:
- What is rumination
- What might be the different between adaptive and maladaptive rumination
- How rumination can become a habit that can maintain low mood, anxiety and depression
- The development and application of Rumination-Focused CBT (RFCBT) to depression
- Practical techniques to shift clients from ruminative abstract, self-critical thinking into concrete, experiential, and compassionate approaches
- When RFCBT may be especially helpful, including with complex or chronic depression
If you enjoyed this episode, check out our sister podcasts, Let’s Talk About CBT and Let’s Talk About CBT – Research Matters for more discussions on evidence-based therapy.
Expressive writing Study Findings
This study aimed to find out how expressive writing interventions can help to reduce rumination caused by difficult life experiences. These difficult life experiences could be losses, upsets, frustrations or major life changes. If someone has experienced difficulties it is quite common to ruminate and re-live these moments leading to dwelling on them to try and make sense of what happened and worrying about the consequences or the impact it has had on their lives.
With the aim of improving mental health interventions and to explore if and how expressive writing could help people who are experiencing this we compared brief self-help writing programmes. These programmes are designed to help reduce rumination and facilitate acceptance and moving on from difficult experiences and life changes. Previous research has found that working through a structured intervention that guides people through a process to come to terms with and move forwards from difficult experiences can be helpful in facilitating acceptance and improving wellbeing.
We compared two versions of this intervention. One version focused on working through the specific details of the experience, how it happened moment-by-moment, and identifying concrete steps and plans to move forwards (concreteness). The other version focused on working through and accepting that experience and the impact it has had on current and future goals, before imagining new goals for the future that are aligned with a higher sense of purpose and values and then making plans for how to pursue these goals (life goals).
Participants were asked to take part in the writing exercises for 6 weeks, there was also a wait-list group, that had no intervention so that we could compare any changes between these groups. 103 people took part, split into roughly three groups at random. To explore if any changes occurred we asked the participants to complete some surveys that looked at repetitive negative thinking, their mental health (anxiety and depression specifically) and some surveys on the presence of meaning in their lives and engaging with goals.
The results showed the life goals writing group, compared to the wait-list and concreteness group showed significant reductions in repetitive negative thought and symptoms of depression, and increased presence of meaning. Both writing groups resulted in increased goal re-engagement and reduced symptoms of anxiety. This is good, preliminary evidence to show that these types of writing tasks could be helpful in supporting people that have experienced difficult life events and are struggling to process what has happened.
Emotional competence self-help app versus cognitive behavioural self-help app versus self-monitoring app to prevent depression in young adults with elevated risk (ECoWeB PREVENT): an international, multicentre, parallel, open-label, randomised controlled trial
Ed Watkins, Fiona Warren, Fiona Warren, Alexandra Newbold, Claire Hulme, Timothy Cranston, Benjamin Aas et al.,
What’s it about?
A cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) app has been found to significantly prevent increases in depression in young people who are at high risk – and could be implemented as a cost effective public mental health measure.
Reflecting on Rumination:
Consequences, Causes, Mechanisms, and Treatment of Rumination
Ed Watkins and Henrietta Roberts
This paper provides a summary of the literature on rumination and summarises the evidence that rumination can contribute to multiple mental health disorders. It describes the effects of rumination on intensifying negative mood and impairing problem-solving. It also outlines a new model [H-Ex-A-Go-N] to explain rumination and looks at effective psychological interventions.
Investigation of Active Ingredients Within Internet-Delivered Cognitive Behavioral Therapy for Depression. A Randomized Optimization Trial
Ed Watkins, Alexandra Newbold, Michelle Tester-Jones, Linda Collins, and Mohammod Mostazir
This study tests the key components of internet-delivered CBT for depression to identify what makes therapy effective. This is an example of the trial design we’ll use in The Calming Minds Project.
Action Slips in Food Choices: A Measure of Habits and Goal-Directed Control
Katie Wood, Tina Seabrooke, and Chris Mitchell
This study creates a new and simple procedure for measuring habitual behaviour that is easy to implement and interpret.
Get involved and take part
Are you ready to make a difference? If you’re 18 or over, we want to hear from you. Join our studies, share your experiences, and contribute to the development of groundbreaking new treatments for anxiety and depression. See how you can get involved and be part of this exciting project.
