Lost in Thoughts - A Quantitative Study About Repetitive Thinking, Gaze Behavior and Experiences of Distress

Abstract: The purpose of the present study was to investigate if and how repetitive negative thinking (RNT) influences the level of experienced distress during recall of images of neutral and negative content, and how such effects might be modulated by gaze behavior. Another aim was to study whether RNT and image content influences participants’ gaze behavior. The data that was analyzed in this thesis was previously collected by students at Lund University under supervision of Sabine Schönfeld and Roger Johansson. Eye-tracking was used to monitor 68 participants’ gaze behavior during recall. Ratings were used to capture experienced distress and a questionnaire was used to classify RNT. Results of the present study showed a main effect of RNT on two distress ratings. The results did not support the prediction that gaze behavior would have an influence on the interplay between RNT and experienced distress. However, an exploratory analysis of gaze behavior, RNT and image type revealed that participants with high versus low RNT experience distress differently depending on how much they look back towards the position where the recalled content was originally encoded.