Patients with affective disorders experience emotional stimuli in laboratory tasks not as isolated events but as part of a complex, temporally unfolding process that can persist and blend across trials, a phenomenon termed impressionability. Two distinct alterations in affectivity were identified: affective enchantment, where intense emotions combine with superstitious thinking, and disintwinement, a sense of detachment and emotional blunting. Standardized image-based tasks often fail to elicit authentic spontaneous emotional responses in clinical populations, limiting their ecological validity. The findings underscore the need for experimental designs that capture the subtle, dynamic nature of altered affectivity, including vital feelings, to better understand emotion dysregulation.
Ruminations are persistent, repetitive, distressing thoughts about negative events and moods, linked to psychiatric disorders and suicidality. This study provides a detailed description of ruminating from a lifeworld perspective, using micro-phenomenological interviews with 51 participants (107 interviews, 79 episodes). Ruminating is an epistemic practice driven by a need to resolve uncertainty after a collapse of commonsense understanding, leading to intellectualization and detachment from embodied responses. It involves paralysis, emptiness, and problematic relationships with knowledge. Rather than a maladaptive thought pattern, ruminating constitutes a complex lifeworld, suggesting a reconceptualization from a unified symptom to a system of interrelated altered experiences.