Abstract / Summary
Ongoing thought varies continuously, yet previous research has shown that people engage in a small set of recurring thought patterns that are consistent across contexts and individuals. However, it remains unclear whether individuals show idiosyncratic, stable configurations, akin to a default experiential state from which momentary experiences deviate. We combined an emotional-induction task with Multidimensional Experience Sampling of ongoing thought in the lab and daily life. Dimensionality reduction revealed five dominant population-level patterns of thought, forming orthogonal axes of a shared experiential space. Within this space, thought patterns were more similar within individuals than between, supporting person-specific signatures. Position within this space carried psychological meaning: depressive symptom severity predicted both the intensity and frequency of negative intrusive thought in daily life. Default thought patterns were then estimated as each participant's geometric median across daily-life experiences and we assessed how affective contexts displaced thought from these defaults. Positive and negative stimuli shifted thought away from default thought patterns in systematic context-dependent ways, and these shifts varied with depressive symptom severity. Together, the findings suggest that default thought patterns define stable regions within an experiential space, while emotional states and individual differences relate to how momentary experience is displaced from these defaults.