Can’t Get You Out of My Head: Brain-Body Interactions in Perseverative Cognition

Perseverative cognition represents a prototypical example of how our internal thoughts can impact our psychological and physical health, as if we were facing an actual environmental stressor (Brosschot et al., 2006). The mechanisms involved—together with other emblematic examples like the placebo effect—provide clear evidence for brain-body interaction. This collection of articles presents recent advances in our understanding of perseverative cognition that have arisen from the integration of multidisciplinary approaches encompassing cognitive and clinical psychology, affective neuroscience, and autonomic physiology. These advances carry with them the promise of more effective treatments to mitigate the negative consequences of maladaptive perseverative cognition on health and well-being. All contributions to the present Research Topic share a definition of perseverative cognition as a rigid pattern of habitual repetitive thoughts that perpetuates threat/stress responses through a characteristic failure of regulatory inhibition. Physiologically, perseverative cognition is expressed across multiple axes, including cardiovascular, autonomic, and endocrine systems (Ottaviani et al., 2016). Among physiological indices, heart rate variability (HRV) has emerged over the past decade as a biomarker that is particularly well-suited for indexing the inflexibility intrinsic to perseverative cognition. In fact, the adaptive rapid application and withdrawal of vagal parasympathetic inhibition, reflected in HRV, is viewed as a dynamic substrate for flexible behavioral routines (Porges, 2007).