Oversampled and undersolved. (Depressive) Rumination from an active inference perspective.

Hello and welcome. It's March 9th, 2023. We're an active guest stream number 38.1 here with Max Berg. Thank you, Max, for joining. This is going to be great. Really looking forward to your presentation and discussion. So appreciation again for joining and looking forward to what you'll share with us today. Yeah, thank you, Daniel, for having me. As I was introduced, my name is Max Berg. I come from the University of Marburg and I'm a clinical psychologist. I want to do a little bit of impression management first. So Marburg is next to Frankfurt. In case you don't know, it's a small or medium city in Germany. And regarding me, I'm interested in the intersection of clinical psychology, neuroscience and philosophy. That doesn't mean that I'm an expert in all of these fields. Of course, I have a lot of knowledge in clinical psychology, I would say, and the rest is more of my hobbies. And so it's important that you keep in mind to expect a clinical perspective today. I'm not an expert on like Bayesian mathematics or anything like that. I know a little bit about it and I've read books about it and try to keep myself updated, but it's not my expertise. My expertise is clinical psychology. And what I want to present today is like a paper about depressive rumination. But we will see that it's not important that it's depressive rumination and rumination is a much broader construct here. And we want to rephrase like depressive rumination from an active inference perspective. And this is what we want to talk about today. Yeah. So I want to start with a little quote and it's rumination is a coin of my realm. Interiority breeds interiority. And we will see that this might be literally true. And this is why I think it's a good quote to start with. So what is rumination? It is defined by the APA as obsessional thinking involving excessive repetitive thoughts or themes that interfere with other forms of mental activity. It is a common feature of OCD and generalized anxiety disorder. I actually don't know why these two disorders were chosen first, but well, here we go. I just quoted them here. I would add major depression to the list. And at least in my mind, major depression is the prototype disorder for rumination. But sure, OCD and generalized anxiety disorder also has a lot of rumination going on. And here you can see a first really important point, namely that rumination is a transdiagnostic marker, right? It's important for multiple psychiatric conditions. And yeah, as said, it's an important transdiagnostic risk factor. And it can predict actually depression and scores and subsequent measurement time points. And this is what makes it interesting. There was like a grant, a small grant proposal by, I believe, the Wellcome Trust in the UK, where they gave grants for writing systematic reviews about transdiagnostic topics in mental health. And unsurprisingly, rumination is one of the topics where they gave or where they wanted to have systematic reviews for which, yeah, they can see that it's an important topic where people really believe that it has some has some utility, clinical utility. And unfortunately, it is also the case that it's associated with worse treatment response for psychotherapy and also for medication treatment. Yeah. And let's make it more complicated, shall we? The rumination is sometimes used interchangeably with the concept of repetitive negative thinking. And sometimes repetitive negative thinking means rumination and varying. But we will use the definition of rumination in its broader sense today. So when I talk about rumination, I also mean varying some of the time. I just wanted to make this clear at the beginning. So I use it in the older broader sense, so to say. Yes. So why would we need a new concept for rumination? Well, reinforcement learning, I would say, struggles to explain the constant continuation of ruminative thinking. To make it short, why should you continue with doing something that is not giving…