Cognitive reactivity (to mood)

The construct that names the “Week 11: Absence of Emotion” theme: a recovered depressive can feel fine and still be at high relapse risk, because the vulnerability is not in their mood but in what a small drop in mood switches back on. Introduced to the wiki with Farb et al. (2011) and its senior author Segal, whose differential-activation lineage (Teasdale) it descends from.

The idea

In a person who has been depressed before, a mild, transient dysphoria does not stay mild. It reactivates the whole processing pattern of the original episode — ruminative self-focus, negative interpretive bias, a globally pessimistic reading of the self and the future. The reactivation is the mechanism of relapse; the triggering mood dip is merely its cue. Two people can have the same small sad mood and only one of them re-opens the depressive pattern. That difference — measurable by provoking a sad mood and seeing how much dysfunctional thinking comes back — is cognitive reactivity, and it predicts relapse up to 18 months out (Segal et al. 2006), independent of current symptoms.

What Farb et al. (2011) added

A neural signature, and a sharpening of what “reactivity” is:

• The relapse-predicting reactivity is in self-referential cortex (BA 24/32), reacting to a sad film — and it tracks trait rumination.
• Felt sadness does not predict relapse (mood ratings r = −.007, ns), but the mode of processing it does. Cognitive reactivity is therefore about elaboration, not intensity — the failure to just perceive an emotional stimulus without turning it into self-evaluation. In relapsers, dorsal (task) and ventral (self) mPFC — normally anticorrelated — become coupled, a “cannot disengage from self-referential processing” signature.
• It is a marker of risk, not regulation. The intuitive reading (frontal engagement = effortful coping) is wrong here: this frontal reactivity forecasts collapse. In predictive-coding terms it looks like active-inference-style elaboration/regulation that fails — the maladaptive twin of perceptual inference.

What Farb et al. (2022) added: it is the treatment-modifiable factor

The RCT sequel Farb et al. (2022) scanned 85 patients before and after prophylactic therapy and split relapse vulnerability into two (the two-factor model). Cognitive reactivity is the dynamic half: prefrontal (left-DLPFC) reactivity to sad film fell over the treatment period in patients who stayed well and did not fall in patients who relapsed (Relapse x Time p=.022), and failure to reduce it predicted relapse (HR 3.73). This is the sharpest evidence yet that cognitive reactivity is not a fixed scar but a movable target — and that lowering it is (part of) what prophylactic therapy does. Two refinements matter: the reactivity here is lateral PFC (elaboration/regulation), not only the medial self-referential mPFC of 2011; and it is trans-therapeutic — MBCT and a well-being reappraisal therapy reduced it equally, so cognitive reactivity is a common mechanism, not a mindfulness-specific one. The other (static) factor, sensory deactivation, treatment did not move at all.

The protective opposite

Cognitive reactivity has a counter-pole, and it is what the wiki’s contemplative material trains: decentering — seeing the dysphoric thought as a transient event rather than a cue to elaborate. In Farb et al. (2011) the protective mode is sensory (visual) reactivity tracking trait acceptance; MBCT (Segal) was built specifically to lower cognitive reactivity by cultivating decentering. This is where the depression-relapse literature meets mindfulness-interoceptive-training and mindfulness-meditation.

Relation to the wiki’s other “reactivated prior” ideas

Cognitive reactivity is a clinical, mood-triggered instance of a pattern the wiki keeps meeting: a prior that reshapes present experience. It rhymes with background-somatic-states (a pre-existing somatic state filtering subsequent ones by congruence, so negative states breed pessimism — the somatic-marker framework’s model of mood) and with schema-guided-symptom-perception (perception driven by past experience rather than present physiology). All three are versions of the past overwriting the present read-out — cognitive reactivity is the version where the overwrite is a whole depressive processing style and the stakes are relapse.