Spontaneous Thought include daydreaming, fantasizing, involuntary autobiographical memories, and rumination about the past and future. Dissociation arises when spontaneous thoughts influence internal models of the self, world, and perception of reality.

Spontaneous Thoughts

Response sets are networks of associated mood sets, action schemata, cognition, and self-representations. This automatic process shapes individuals sense of reality. Misunderstanding or hyperawareness of response sets can lead to feeling agent less over behaviors and feelings. 

Response Sets 

Failure to understand, interpret, and elaborate ones emotional experiences. There is a link between dissociation and Alexithymia. There is an inability to interpret situational and internal triggers that are be processed without introspection. Thus, emotional threshold is high to a point where feelings aren't easily manageable. Individual feels emotions are extreme and unpredictable because of their inability to process situations for self-representations. 

This is also common in Autism Spectrum Disorder and can contribute to difficulty self-regulating emotions, since one needs to be able to identify the emotions in order to regulate them effectively.

Alexithymia 

Instead of focusing on the sole presence of trauma, there should be examination of how it influences the individuals ability to function. Dissociation is associated with psychological distress. Research should be centered around how triggers impact sleep, cognition, and view of self and world. Systems not able to return to an equilibrium causes temporary distributions in reality and can be triggered by association through association.

Failure to Adapt

increased activation and fluency semantically and emotionally related concepts and networks following the activation of a specific concept, emotion, and memory. This process involves the overlap between cognitive-affective processing and fantasy-based cognition from sleep to waking

Hyperassociativity

Under-estimating situational and environmental cues and Over-estimating personality cues. Theorized to contribute to dissociation by failure to control disturbing content from consciousness and unable to understand them

Fundamental Mis-attribution Error

-Response sets


-Spontaneous Thoughts


- Alexithymia


-Failure to Adapt


-Hyperassociativity 


-Fundamental Mis-attribution error

Michigan State University

Origins of dissociation are multifactorial, differ from each individual, and can be linked to failure in adaptive mechanisms in traumatic and non-traumatic stressors.

Transtheoretical Model

Lynn, S. J., Polizzi, C., Merckelbach, H., Chiu, C.-D., Maxwell, R., van Heugten, D., &amp; Lilienfeld, S. O. (2022). Dissociation and dissociative disorders reconsidered: Beyond sociocognitive and trauma models toward a transtheoretical framework. Annual Review of Clinical Psychology, 18(1), 259–289. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-clinpsy-081219-102424 

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