Know Yourself: An Adaptive Causal Network Model for Therapeutic Intervention for Regaining Cognitive Control

Long term stress often causes depression and neuronal atrophies that in turn can lead to a variety of health problems. As a result of these cellular changes, also molecular changes occur. These changes, that include increase of glucocorticoids and decrease of the brain-derived neurotrophic factor, have the unfortunate effect that they decrease the cognitive abilities needed for the individual to solve the stressful situation. Such cognitive abilities like reappraisal and their adaptation mechanisms turn out to be substantially impaired while they are needed for regulation of the negative emotions. However, antidepressant treatments and some other therapies have proved to be quite effective for the strengthening of such cognitive abilities. This study introduces an adaptive causal network model for this phenomenon where a subject loses his or her cognitive abilities (negative metaplasticity) due to long-term stress and re-improve these cognitive abilities (positive metaplasticity) through mindfulness-based cognitive therapy (MBCT). Simulation results have been reported for demonstration of the phenomenon.