Why Negative Thoughts Get Stuck

Imagine that you send a message to a friend but don't hear back. At first, you might think: “Maybe they’re busy”. Another possibility may also come to mind: “Perhaps they’re annoyed with me”. Later that day, you notice they have been active online. The negative interpretation may now feel more convincing. Even when your friend eventually replies and apologizes for being busy, you may still wonder whether something is wrong.

Negative interpretations of ambiguous situations, as in this example, are common and relevant for people’s mental health. What is particularly important for mental health is not simply whether a negative interpretation enters people’s minds but whether they can let go of it when situations evolve or change.

Our recent research suggests that persistent negative interpretations may become intertwined with emotions and repetitive thinking in self-reinforcing cycles.

From Negative Thinking to Inflexible Thinking

Research has long shown that depression and anxiety are linked to interpretation bias (Everaert et al., 2017; Wurtz et al., 2026). This a tendency to assign more negative and less benign meanings to ambiguous situations. Yet, two people can arrive at the same negative interpretation and respond very differently afterward. For example, two colleagues may notice that their supervisor is unusually quiet during a meeting. They may each wonder: “Did I do something wrong?” When the supervisor later mentions being tired, one colleague may revise this initial interpretation while the other may hold onto it. The difference is not necessarily the negative content of the thought, but its flexibility. Difficulties in revising negative interpretations are called negative interpretation inflexibility (Everaert et al., 2018; Deng et al., 2022).

From the Lab to Daily Life

Most research on interpretation bias and negative interpretation inflexibility has relied on experimental tasks used in highly controlled research laboratories. To study these processes in everyday life, we recently developed the Daily Life Interpretation Inflexibility Task. This is a mobile cognitive task embedded in repeated smartphone assessments.

To examine negative interpretation inflexibility in the real world, we recruited a community sample of 179 adults with varying levels of depression and anxiety (Vos et al., 2026a; 2026b). They all took part for 14 days and received six prompts per day. At each prompt, participants completed brief questions about mental health and the new mobile cognitive task. This allowed us to examine whether the tendency to maintain negative meanings fluctuated from moment to moment and how those fluctuations related to changing emotions and repetitive thought.

When Negative Interpretations Persist

As expected, our first study (Vos et al., 2026a) showed that people reporting more symptoms of depression and social anxiety showed greater persistence of negative interpretations. However, the more interesting findings concerned what happened within the same person over time.

When someone's negative interpretations were more persistent than usual, they subsequently tended to experience more negative emotions. The reverse was also true. More negative emotion or less positive emotion predicted greater persistence of negative interpretations afterward.

When these pathways were modeled simultaneously, emotion-to-cognition effects were stronger than cognition-to-emotion effects. Rather than supporting the simple notion that “thoughts cause feelings”, our results point to a feedback system. How we interpret situations may shape how we feel, but how we feel may also shape how we reconsider our interpretations of ambiguity. This emotion-to-cognition pathway was especially pronounced among people with higher levels of depression and social anxiety symptoms. Their emotional states were more strongly related to whether negative interpretations subsequently persisted.

Repetitive Thinking Can Fuel the Cycle

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Our study also examined repetitive thinking patterns. Consider the previous example about the unanswered message from a friend. After deciding that your friend may be annoyed, you could move on or repeatedly revisit the situation by thinking: “Why haven't they answered?” or “Maybe they don't really want to spend time with me”. This repetitive focus on negative aspects of a situation is called rumination.

We found a reciprocal relationship between rumination and persistent negative interpretations. Greater persistence predicted increases in rumination. Greater rumination in turn predicted more persistence afterward. A negative interpretation may provide material for rumination, while rumination may make it harder to move away from that interpretation.

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We also examined dampening. This is the tendency to reduce positive emotions through thoughts such as “This won't last” or “I just got lucky”. Persistent negative interpretations predicted more subsequent dampening. Evidence for the reverse pathway was weaker, but complementary analyses suggested that dampening may also exert a small reinforcing influence.

Together, these findings suggest that negative interpretations are embedded in a dynamic system involving emotion and forms of repetitive thinking affecting both negative and positive emotions.

Mental Health May Involve the Ability to Update

Our findings imply that mental health does not require interpreting everything positively. Sometimes situations are negative. The goal is not to replace every negative thought with a positive one. What may matter more is maintaining the capacity to update or revise initial negative beliefs. Can you consider alternative explanations? Can your interpretations change when new information becomes available? Psychological flexibility may involve adjusting our internal model of what is happening rather than firmly holding on to established interpretations.

Emotions Deserve More Attention

Our findings also suggest that promoting flexible thinking may require more than merely challenging thoughts. Cognitive therapy often aims to change emotional experience by challenging negative thoughts. This pathway still matters, but our results also emphasize the reverse direction.

When people experienced more negative or less positive emotions, negative interpretations were more likely to persist afterward. This raises the possibility that sometimes it may be easier to reconsider a thought after first changing the emotional context in which it is evaluated. That might involve reducing distress through various emotion regulation strategies, disrupting repetitive thinking, seeking supportive contact, or attending to positive experiences before returning to an interpretation. Future research needs to test whether such strategies could improve negative interpretation flexibility. Our studies tracked processes over time, but temporal associations alone cannot establish causality.

Catching the Moment When a Thought Becomes Sticky

The mobile approach of our study also enables another possibility. Instead of treating cognitive vulnerability as something a person simply “has”, we may be able to identify moments of vulnerability. Someone may be relatively flexible most of the day but become cognitively rigid after a stressful interaction or when rumination begins to escalate. Digital interventions could detect such moments and provide brief support precisely when a negative interpretation is becoming difficult to update. That might involve prompting alternative explanations, interrupting rumination, or regulating an emotional state that is helping the negative interpretation persist. This remains an important future direction.