Rumination, Negative Cognition, and Cognitive Rigidity in Adolescent Mental Health: Mechanisms, Assessment, and Intervention

Rumination, negative cognition, and cognitive rigidity are each established correlates and prospective predictors of adolescent psychopathology. Rumination, defined as perseverative attention to negative affect and its causes and consequences, predicts the onset, persistence, and recurrence of depressive and anxious symptoms. Negative cognitive content, including negative self-schemas, hopelessness, self-criticism, and interpretive bias, confers vulnerability that is typically activated under stress. Cognitive rigidity refers to difficulty disengaging from prepotent mental sets, shifting attentional or response set, and updating beliefs in light of disconfirming evidence, and has been implicated in depression, obsessive-compulsive and eating-related presentations, and suicidal thinking. Each construct carries independent explanatory and predictive value. Each may also interact with the others, or reflect shared substrates in cognitive control and self-referential processing. Adolescence, marked by protracted maturation of prefrontal control systems alongside heightened self-evaluative and social sensitivity, offers a critical window for delineating these processes.Adolescence carries a steep rise in the incidence of depression, anxiety, self-harm, and suicidal behaviour, and cognitive vulnerability models remain among the most productive frameworks for explaining this risk. This Research Topic invites work on three such vulnerabilities, namely rumination, negative cognition, and cognitive rigidity, examined either singly or in combination. Contributions addressing a single construct in depth are as welcome as those testing interactions among them, and we do not require that all three be represented within a given submission.We are particularly interested in work that specifies mechanism rather than association. This includes studies identifying the conditions, timescales, developmental stages, and subgroups under which a cognitive vulnerability becomes pathogenic; distinguishing state from trait expressions; establishing incremental predictive validity over established risk factors; and testing whether these processes are modifiable and whether their modification produces symptom change. Longitudinal, intensive longitudinal, experimental, neurocognitive, computational, and clinical trial designs are all appropriate. The overarching aim is to improve early identification and to inform developmentally sensitive, mechanistically targeted intervention.We welcome theoretical, empirical, methodological, and intervention-focused contributions addressing rumination, negative cognition, or cognitive rigidity, individually or jointly, in adolescent mental health. Areas of interest include: these constructs as early-warning, maintenance, or transdiagnostic markers of depression, anxiety, self-harm, and suicidal ideation; developmental and longitudinal trajectories, and their moderation by family, peer, school, cultural, and socioeconomic context; underlying cognitive, affective, neurobiological, and interpersonal mechanisms, including attentional disengagement, set-shifting, and belief updating; measurement and assessment innovation, including ecological momentary assessment, behavioural and neurocognitive paradigms, digital phenotyping, network analysis, and computational modelling; protective and compensatory processes such as psychological flexibility and adaptive reappraisal; and prevention or intervention research, including rumination-focused CBT, mindfulness- and acceptance-based approaches, cognitive training, and digital or school-based programmes.Original Research, Brief Research Reports, Systematic Reviews and Meta-analyses, methodological and measurement papers, and clinical or intervention studies are all welcome. Topic editors: Hongyu Zou, Taosheng Liu, Tong Su, Wei Zhang, Aibo Wang Source: https://www.frontiersin.org/research-topics/85113/rumination-negative-cognition-and-cognitive-rigidity-in-adolescent-mental-health-mechanisms-assessment-and-intervention