Before I Am Received: Anticipatory Self-Formatting, Relational Asymmetry, and the Regulatory Uses of Cognition

Abstract

Cognition is ordinarily treated as a capacity for representing, predicting, reasoning about, and solving problems. Yet capacities can also acquire regulatory functions, particularly when uncertainty is embedded in consequential social relations. This article proposes anticipatory self-formatting as a provisional label for a candidate relational-regulatory process: the organization of psychologically unfinished experience into a more intelligible, defensible, and readily receivable form before presenting it to another person. The proposed mechanism is not that sophisticated cognition is inherently defensive, nor that extensive preparation constitutes pathology. Rather, preparatory cognition may sometimes alter the conditions of reception itself by reducing the portion of interpretation, evaluation, or resolution that remains dependent upon another person’s uncontrolled judgment.

The article subjects this proposal to an explicit construct-discrimination burden. Anticipatory self-formatting overlaps with impression management, perfectionistic self-presentation, self-verification, metaperception, intolerance of uncertainty, need for cognitive closure, repetitive negative thinking, experiential avoidance, attachment-related avoidance, defensive pessimism, and overcontrol. It warrants independent theoretical status only if relational asymmetry predicts preparatory cognition beyond these established processes. Evidence concerning healthy dependency, secure-base functioning, social regulation, epistemic trust, therapeutic rupture and repair, regulatory flexibility, interoception, and epistemic injustice is used to specify moderators and boundary conditions rather than to claim direct validation of the proposed process.

A proportionality principle is central: intensive preparation may be adaptive where receivers are unreliable, institutional credibility is unevenly distributed, or errors of interpretation carry substantial costs. Generative artificial intelligence then provides a theoretically informative relational comparator because it offers responsive linguistic interpretation under unusually high user control and reduced ordinary reciprocity. The article concludes with a falsifiable process model and a program of experimental, dyadic, ecological, and human-AI studies. The developmental target proposed is receptive flexibility: the capacity to mobilize cognition when cognition serves the situation, to terminate it when its regulatory necessity has passed, and to tolerate appropriately bounded dependence upon another credible mind without equating influence with possession.

Keywords: mentalization; epistemic trust; dependency; self-presentation; intolerance of uncertainty; metaperception; repetitive negative thinking; psychotherapy; artificial intelligence; regulatory flexibility

I. From Cognitive Capacity to Relational Regulation

An experience occurs that is difficult to understand, emotionally consequential, humiliating, uncertain, or relationally dangerous. Before another person encounters that experience, substantial private cognitive labor may take place: chronology is reconstructed, evidence is sorted, motives are distinguished from observable behavior, alternative interpretations are generated, relevant history is supplied, contradictions are identified, anticipated objections are answered, and language is refined until the experience has acquired a form capable of surviving another person’s scrutiny. By the time the experience is disclosed, what the receiver encounters is no longer psychologically unfinished in the sense in which it initially occurred. The receiver encounters an already organized representation.

Such preparation is often useful and sometimes indispensable. Reflection improves judgment; documentation can correct memory; preparing for a consequential conversation can reduce confusion; and the capacity to distinguish observation from inference is an achievement rather than a symptom. Psychological theory becomes unreliable when it treats a genuine strength as pathological simply because that strength can occasionally perform defensive work. Cognitive ability should therefore be granted the same conceptual dignity accorded to other capacities: its existence need not be explained by the regulatory functions to which it may sometimes be recruited.

The relevant distinction is between capacity and recruitment. A person may possess relatively stable abilities in abstraction, synthesis, verbal reasoning, pattern recognition, planning, research, or systems construction while the intensity and function of those abilities vary sharply across situations. Under some conditions cognition serves curiosity, aesthetic pleasure, occupational performance, discovery, or ordinary problem solving; under others, the same cognitive architecture may become more intensely commissioned because uncertainty, evaluation, dependency, or another person’s interpretive discretion has become consequential. The visible behavior can remain almost identical—researching, writing, modeling, verifying—while its regulatory function changes.

This article uses anticipatory self-formatting as a provisional descriptive label for one candidate instance of such recruitment: the pre-receptive organization of unfinished psychological material into a representation that is easier to interpret, defend, evaluate, or manage before another person encounters it. The proposal is intentionally narrower than a personality theory and weaker than a validated latent construct. No dedicated measure currently establishes that anticipatory self-formatting possesses factorial independence, discriminant validity, temporal stability, or incremental predictive power. The appropriate initial claim is therefore that it identifies a candidate relational-regulatory process whose independent status remains contingent upon empirical discrimination from neighboring explanations.

The proposed residual lies in the object of regulation. A person may not simply be reducing uncertainty about what happened, regulating affect, achieving closure, or constructing a desirable impression. Preparatory cognition may also reduce what might be called interpretive exposure: the extent to which the meaning, consequences, or subsequent handling of an experience remains contingent upon another person’s unanticipated interpretation. The term is not intended as an additional psychological construct requiring its own scale; it designates a property of the situation that can be decomposed into more tractable dimensions, including how much discretion the receiver possesses, how consequential error would be, how readily misunderstanding can be corrected, and how dependent resolution is upon the receiver’s judgment.

The distinction becomes visible when two equally sophisticated analyses produce different relational consequences. In one case, reflection increases curiosity, reduces certainty about inferred motives, improves awareness of affective and bodily information, and makes the eventual conversation more capable of changing the person’s view. In another, reflection produces a coherent account that has already anticipated most plausible objections and established what the person will do if the receiver disagrees; the analysis may be accurate, but another mind has become less necessary to determine what the experience means or what should happen next. The difference is functional rather than intellectual.

Any such proposal immediately faces a severe problem: psychology already contains multiple theories explaining why people organize experience before evaluation. Unless anticipatory self-formatting survives those rivals, it is construct proliferation rather than theoretical progress.

II. The Reductive Challenge

The strongest test of anticipatory self-formatting is not whether the phenomenon feels recognizable but whether established constructs can explain the same behavioral pattern more economically. Contemporary psychology has accumulated a large family of concepts involving anticipatory cognition, evaluation, self-presentation, control, uncertainty, avoidance, and interpersonal regulation. Several are sufficiently close that failure to discriminate among them would make a new label scientifically unnecessary.

Impression management and perfectionistic self-presentation

Leary and Kowalski’s (1990) two-component model distinguishes the motivation to influence how one is perceived from the construction of a particular impression. Because impressions become especially important when they affect valued outcomes, impression management supplies an obvious account of pre-receptive preparation: the individual organizes information because the receiver’s evaluation matters. Perfectionistic self-presentation makes the challenge still sharper by locating perfectionism within interpersonal display. Hewitt et al. (2003) distinguished perfectionistic self-promotion, nondisplay of imperfection, and nondisclosure of imperfection, while a recent systematic review and meta-analysis across 30 studies and 37 samples found perfectionistic self-presentation associated with multiple forms of psychopathology and reinforced the importance of distinguishing its component facets (Casale et al., 2024).

Anticipatory self-formatting therefore cannot be defined by a preference for polished presentation, concealment of imperfection, or concern with evaluation. Its proposed residual is visible only where extensive preparation persists even when the intended representation is unfavorable, self-incriminating, or explicitly uncertain. A person may organize a disclosure in order to concede responsibility, acknowledge confusion, or present evidence contradicting their own preferred interpretation. If preparation disappears when favorable impression is no longer at stake, impression-management accounts are sufficient. If it persists because the receiver still possesses consequential interpretive discretion, the relational-regulatory hypothesis gains territory.

Self-verification and metaperception

Self-verification presents an even more serious theoretical rival because it directly concerns the desire for others to perceive the self in ways that accord with existing self-conceptions. Classic work argues that self-verifying feedback can serve predictability and control even when the verified self-view is negative, and meta-analytic evidence indicates that self-enhancement does not simply override self-verification across conditions (Kwang & Swann, 2010; Swann et al., 1992). The overlap with anticipatory self-formatting is substantial: both processes can make another person’s representation less surprising and both can operate without seeking an especially flattering outcome.

The distinction lies principally in timing and target. Self-verification concerns the congruence between external feedback and established self-views; anticipatory self-formatting concerns how material is organized before feedback is received and can occur where no stable self-conception is at issue. A person may not know what a conflict means, what motive drove a behavior, or whether an interpretation is correct, yet still organize the uncertainty extensively before presenting it. Empirically, the strongest discrimination would therefore hold feedback congruence constant while manipulating how much consequential interpretive discretion the receiver possesses.

Adjacent work on metaperception makes another portion of the problem explicit. People form beliefs about how others see them, but meta-accuracy is imperfect and depends upon relational context, attribute domain, and measurement approach (Harper et al., 2026; Vorauer et al., 2025). Anticipatory self-formatting may be partly driven by predicted reception, yet its principal outcome need not be accurate prediction of what another person thinks. Indeed, excessive pre-formatting could conceivably reduce meta-accuracy if the person becomes increasingly certain about the representation the receiver should form and correspondingly less attentive to the representation the receiver actually forms.

Intolerance of uncertainty, need for closure, and repetitive negative thinking

The uncertainty literature supplies another major reduction challenge. Grupe and Nitschke (2013) describe anxiety as involving anticipatory cognitive, affective, and behavioral responses under uncertain threat, and subsequent meta-analytic work has established intolerance of uncertainty as a robust transdiagnostic correlate of psychopathology (McEvoy et al., 2019). More recent work strengthens the challenge: Sahib et al. (2023), synthesizing 91 studies, found systematic associations between intolerance of uncertainty and emotion-regulation strategies, while Akbari et al. (2026), in a preregistered meta-analysis spanning 138 independent samples, characterized intolerance of uncertainty as a relatively distal factor and worry as a more proximal cognitive process across anxiety phenotypes.

Need-for-closure theory similarly predicts motivational pressure toward definite knowledge, including tendencies to acquire closure and preserve it once achieved (Kruglanski & Webster, 1996). Repetitive negative thinking supplies a still broader process account encompassing worry and rumination. Contemporary evidence supports substantial transdiagnostic commonality across forms of repetitive negative thinking, and computational approaches increasingly frame persistence in terms of failures of meta-control rather than the content of thought alone (Hitchcock & Frank, 2024; Stenzel et al., 2025).

These theories impose a strict boundary on the new proposal. Anticipatory self-formatting must not be inferred simply from extensive cognition, persistence, worry, or relief produced by greater certainty. Its distinctive prediction is that matched uncertainty should elicit more preparation when another person’s consequential interpretation is introduced than when the uncertainty is equally difficult but impersonal. The substantive object may remain unresolved; what changes is the amount of uncontrolled reception still ahead. If relational asymmetry adds nothing once intolerance of uncertainty, worry, and need for closure are measured, the new account is unnecessary.

Experiential avoidance and intellectualization

Hayes et al.’s (1996) functional account of experiential avoidance remains important because it prevents the outward form of sophisticated cognition from determining its psychological meaning. A correct analysis can still function to alter unwanted private experience; cognitive accuracy does not make a behavior nonregulatory. Psychodynamic work on defensive style makes an overlapping point from another theoretical tradition: abstract or conceptual thought can reduce contact with disturbing affect without making abstract thought itself pathological (Bond et al., 1983).

Anticipatory self-formatting therefore cannot be established by demonstrating that cognition reduces distress. The proposed process concerns a narrower regulatory outcome: reduced dependence upon another person’s interpretive contribution. Affect may remain intense, and the person may remain entirely conscious of anger, grief, shame, or fear while nevertheless becoming less vulnerable to what the receiver will make of those states. The empirical task is to separate affect reduction from reduction in relational exposure.

Attachment avoidance and support regulation

Attachment-related avoidance is a particularly strong relational competitor because it predicts differences in support seeking and reception. Collins and Feeney (2000) found attachment-related avoidance associated with less effective support-seeking behavior, and a later systematic review of 43 studies involving romantic dyads concluded that insecure attachment was associated with poorer support behavior and more negative interpretations of received support (McLeod et al., 2020). A large meta-analysis also confirms broad associations between adult attachment insecurity and mental-health outcomes (Zhang et al., 2022).

If anticipatory self-formatting is simply an elaborate form of avoiding interpersonal dependence, attachment constructs may explain it sufficiently. The proposed residual is more paradoxical: the individual may seek support frequently, maintain close relationships, and actively solicit another person’s thinking while first reducing how much unstructured interpretive labor remains for that person to perform. The behavioral signature would therefore be help seeking with unusually extensive preprocessing, not simple avoidance of help.

Defensive pessimism, anticipatory coping, and overcontrol

Defensive pessimism demonstrates why anticipatory cognition cannot automatically be classified as maladaptive. Norem and Cantor (1986) showed that some individuals use low expectations and extensive anticipation strategically in situations where anxiety might otherwise disrupt performance. More broadly, preparatory control can improve coping in genuinely demanding environments. The difference from anticipatory self-formatting is again relational specificity: defensive pessimism does not require another mind whose interpretation matters.

Overcontrol offers a broader clinical alternative. RO-DBT was developed for maladaptive patterns characterized by excessive inhibitory control, and evidence from the RefraMED trial and subsequent systematic review suggests potential clinical utility while also underscoring the limited and population-specific state of the evidence (Hatoum & Burton, 2024; Lynch et al., 2020). Anticipatory self-formatting should not become a synonym for overcontrol. Overcontrol describes a much wider organization of behavior and emotional expression; the present proposal concerns a more local sequence that may appear in otherwise flexible individuals when particular relational conditions are present.

Table 1 · Discriminating anticipatory self-formatting from neighboring constructs

Neighboring account	Primary target of regulation	Another consequential mind required?	Typical relation to presentation valence	Receiver credibility should strongly moderate?	Prediction that would distinguish anticipatory self-formatting
Impression management	Social evaluation / desired impression	Usually	Often favorable or strategically desirable	Sometimes	Preparation persists even for unfavorable self-presentation when receiver discretion remains consequential
Perfectionistic self-presentation	Appearing perfect / concealing imperfection	Usually	Strongly biased toward avoiding imperfection	Sometimes	Preparation remains high when imperfection is openly conceded and perfection is not achievable
Self-verification	Congruence between feedback and existing self-view	Yes	Can be positive or negative	Yes	Preparation occurs before feedback and when no stable self-view is available to verify
Metaperception	Estimating how others perceive the self	Yes	Neutral with respect to valence	Yes	Preparation changes even when predicted perception is held constant but receiver discretion changes
Intolerance of uncertainty	Unknown or indeterminate outcomes	No	Valence-neutral	Not necessarily	Relational uncertainty produces additional preparation beyond matched impersonal uncertainty
Need for closure	Definiteness / decisional closure	No	Valence-neutral	Not necessarily	Substantive ambiguity remains acceptable once conditions of reception have been structured
Repetitive negative thinking	Persistent negative cognition / failed disengagement	No	Predominantly negative	Not necessarily	Preparation can be finite, valence-neutral, and specifically triggered by anticipated reception
Experiential avoidance / intellectualization	Unwanted private experience / affective contact	No	Variable	Not necessarily	Affect remains accessible while perceived dependence on another interpretation declines
Attachment avoidance	Exposure to dependency and intimacy	Yes	Variable	Yes	Person seeks support but extensively preprocesses what the supporter is asked to hold
Defensive pessimism / anticipatory coping	Anxiety and performance under anticipated risk	No	Often negative expectation	Not necessarily	Equivalent performance uncertainty produces greater preparation only when reception itself is consequential
Overcontrol	Broad inhibitory and behavioral control	No	Variable	Sometimes	Behavior is situationally recruited and can otherwise remain highly flexible

The table clarifies the theoretical burden. Anticipatory self-formatting is not justified because it overlaps with these processes; overlap is expected. Its independent status depends upon incremental relational specificity.

III. Relational Asymmetry as the Proposed Trigger

Uncertainty becomes theoretically distinctive when it also constitutes a temporary distribution of agency. Not knowing tomorrow’s weather, not knowing the solution to an unfamiliar problem, and not knowing whether a therapist, physician, supervisor, partner, or friend will understand an account are all informationally incomplete states, but only some of them place consequential judgment in another person’s hands. Another person may possess knowledge one lacks, control access to a resource, decide whether assistance will be given, determine how a claim will be classified, or form an interpretation that cannot be immediately reversed. In such cases, uncertainty is partly relational because resolution depends upon a mind whose activity remains autonomous.

This does not imply that human dependence is intrinsically dysregulating. Attachment and social-regulation research points in the opposite direction. Bornstein et al. (2002) distinguish healthy dependency from destructive overdependence and dysfunctional detachment, while secure-base research shows that partner availability, encouragement, and noninterference can facilitate autonomous exploration rather than suppress it (Feeney & Thrush, 2010). Social baseline theory similarly proposes that human cognition and regulation are organized around expected access to social resources, such that familiar and predictable others can reduce the effort associated with threat and goal pursuit (Beckes & Sbarra, 2022). The mature alternative to dependence is therefore not universal independence; under many circumstances competent interdependence reduces rather than increases regulatory burden.

The proposed trigger is more specific: consequential relational asymmetry under conditions in which another person’s discretion cannot be fully governed in advance. Four dimensions are especially important. The first is consequence: how much turns on the receiver’s interpretation. The second is discretion: how much latitude the receiver possesses in deciding what the material means or what follows from it. The third is correctability: how easily a misunderstanding can be repaired once formed. The fourth is dependency: how much the desired outcome requires the receiver’s knowledge, decision, care, or continued cooperation.

These dimensions clarify why cognition can alter relational geometry. Documentation reduces dependence on memory or goodwill; precise language constrains the range of plausible misunderstanding; contingency planning limits the costs of refusal; anticipatory counterargument reduces surprise; and knowledge of institutional procedures converts opaque discretion into more predictable rule-governed behavior. None of these strategies is irrational. Their function becomes clinically interesting only when they continue to be recruited at intensities poorly matched to the actual environment.

The central hypothesis can therefore be formulated without pathologizing preparation: as consequential relational asymmetry increases, some individuals will intensify cognitive preparation beyond the level predicted by informational uncertainty alone, and sufficient preparation will reduce perceived dependence upon the receiving mind even before any new external information has arrived. The claim becomes stronger if the effect is moderated by receiver credibility and weaker if it generalizes indiscriminately across relational and nonrelational contexts.

IV. Proportionality, Credibility, and Epistemic Justice

No theory of preparatory cognition can infer defense directly from the amount of preparation because the costs of being misunderstood are not evenly distributed. Institutions differ in competence and contestability, individuals differ in how much presumptive credibility they receive, and some receiving environments require unusually exact forms of evidence before a person’s account becomes actionable.

Carel and Kidd (2014) describe epistemic injustice in healthcare as a failure to recognize patients adequately as contributors to knowledge concerning their own illness. Empirical evidence demonstrates why that concern cannot remain purely philosophical. Beach et al. (2021), examining clinical documentation, found linguistic features associated with disbelief or doubt distributed differently across patient groups, including differences involving race and gender. Such findings do not establish that any specific patient will be disbelieved, but they demonstrate that credibility environments can contain systematic asymmetries.

A patient with an unusual or contested condition may therefore be rational to bring dates, records, photographs, medication histories, measurements, and a precise chronology. A disabled person seeking accommodation may have to satisfy an evidentiary regime that punishes incompleteness. A worker entering a disciplinary or discrimination process may correctly infer that the organizational consequences of ambiguity are asymmetric. A person whose earlier accounts have repeatedly been dismissed may increase preparation because the receiving environment has taught them that unformatted experience is costly.

This produces a constitutive proportionality principle: the psychological significance of anticipatory preparation cannot be determined independently of objective stakes, prior reliability, credibility conditions, and ease of correction. Preparation that appears excessive under benign assumptions may be proportionate once the receiving environment is correctly specified. Conversely, a strategy developed under genuinely unreliable conditions may become costly if it remains fully commissioned after the environment changes.

The theory therefore predicts not simply preparation but residual preparation after environmental demand has been modeled. In empirical work, this requires more than asking participants whether they “overprepare.” Researchers would need independent measures or manipulations of objective consequence, receiver reliability, prior treatment history, correctability, and power. Only the portion of preparation not plausibly explained by those environmental features should be interpreted as evidence for overrecruitment.

The justice condition also constrains the clinical use of the theory. Therapists, physicians, managers, and other institutional receivers cannot designate another person’s preparation as defensive solely because it complicates their own authority. A theory about excessive management of reception would become ethically incoherent if it licensed receivers to demand unprotected openness from people whose earlier openness has been mishandled. The proper question is not whether the person will surrender protective structure but whether the structure remains responsive to evidence that this particular receiver is credible.

V. Giving, Receiving, and the Regulation of Dependence

The relational mechanism becomes clearer when the positions of giving and receiving are distinguished. Social-support research increasingly rejects the assumption that support is beneficial simply because it is available. Zee et al. (2020), across eight studies and a pooled meta-analysis, introduced the concept of regulatory effectiveness of support, arguing that beneficial support often depends upon whether it addresses recipients’ needs for truth and control. This is especially relevant to the present proposal because it indicates that receiving can become easier when assistance preserves the recipient’s ability to understand the situation and experience competence within it.

Inagaki et al. (2016) likewise found nonidentical associations for support giving and support receiving in a small correlational neuroimaging study. The study cannot establish a causal regulatory advantage of giving, but it supports the narrower inference that the two positions should not be treated as psychologically interchangeable. Giving often permits greater agency over timing, form, and obligation; receiving requires tolerating the competence, motives, timing, and possible expectations of another person.

Competence can therefore produce regulatory benefits without becoming counterfeit competence. Organizing a problem reduces dependence on another person’s organization; supplying an answer reduces the period during which one must wait for an answer; providing support can make one’s relational usefulness more predictable than the obligations created by receiving support. The hypothesis that follows is deliberately limited: for some individuals and in some contexts, being useful or indispensable may be easier to regulate than being receptively dependent.

This proposition generates a discriminating prediction. Receiving should become easier when help is competent, bounded, nonintrusive, explicit about reciprocity, and easy to refuse, while difficulty should increase when assistance creates uncertain obligation, vague future claims, poorly defined boundaries, or loss of decision authority. If receiving remains equally difficult even when these properties are manipulated, a broad attachment or interpersonal-trust account may be more plausible than the specific regulatory mechanism proposed here.

Anticipatory self-formatting may also transform the act of requesting help. A person can seek another mind while performing much of the cognitive work the encounter would otherwise require: reconstructing chronology, identifying competing hypotheses, delimiting the uncertainty, anticipating objections, specifying what kind of response would be useful, and even providing an account of why the person suspects they may be preparing too extensively. Such behavior may be highly efficient, particularly in professional settings where time is scarce. Yet its relational consequence is worth measuring because the receiver is asked to hold considerably less unstructured uncertainty on the person’s behalf.

The important question is therefore not whether the person seeks help but how much unresolved epistemic work remains available for another person to perform. A person may appear highly collaborative while preserving near-complete control over the architecture within which collaboration occurs.

VI. Mentalization, Epistemic Trust, and the Problem of Overprecision

The proposed process cannot be understood through dependence alone because receiving another person’s mind requires an epistemic stance as well as an attachment stance. Mentalization theory is relevant precisely because it treats interpretation of behavior through mental states as indispensable while also recognizing that mental states remain partly opaque. The adaptive problem is not whether people infer intentions and emotions but whether those inferences remain sufficiently revisable.

Fonagy et al. (2017) place epistemic trust within a developmental account of openness to socially transmitted knowledge, although their argument is developed in relation to borderline personality disorder and should not be generalized without qualification. Since that paper, epistemic trust has begun to acquire a more empirical measurement architecture. The Epistemic Trust, Mistrust, and Credulity Questionnaire and the Questionnaire Epistemic Trust provide emerging self-report approaches, while psychotherapy research has begun to operationalize state-like manifestations of trust through sharing, “we-mode,” and receptiveness to learning (Fisher et al., 2023; Knapen et al., 2024). This measurement program remains developing rather than settled, which is itself instructive: epistemic trust should not be invoked as though it were already a unitary, fully validated explanatory variable.

For the present theory, the central distinction is between mentalization and epistemic sovereignty. A person can infer that another individual may have become angry because they felt ignored while retaining awareness that the inference is provisional; alternatively, a sufficiently coherent model can begin functioning as though the other mind has already yielded its meaning. Cognitive sophistication can increase this risk because plausible models become easier to generate. The danger is not an inability to mentalize but the possibility that confidence grows faster than evidence.

Metaperception research reinforces that concern. People are imperfect judges of how others see them, and contemporary reviews emphasize substantial methodological and contextual variation in meta-accuracy (Harper et al., 2026; Vorauer et al., 2025). A person who repeatedly anticipates another’s interpretation may therefore become highly practiced at constructing models of reception without becoming correspondingly more accurate about the receiver’s actual mind.

The same methodological caution applies to self-understanding. A psychologically sophisticated autobiographical theory may connect childhood, attachment, work, anger, grief, values, dependency, and present behavior into an unusually coherent explanatory structure. Such coherence can be useful, but coherence cannot function as its own validation criterion. If behavior contradicts the model, the model must lose territory. Repeated comfortable dependence on trustworthy people would weaken a theory of generalized defensive autonomy; easy delegation to competent authority would weaken a broad claim about control; equally intense analysis during safe aesthetic play would increase the explanatory weight of temperament and intrinsic cognitive reward.

This principle is especially important for anticipatory self-formatting because the construct itself is intellectually seductive. A theory concerned with excessive control over interpretation must not protect itself by controlling the interpretation of every counterexample.

VII. Transition Dynamics, Repetitive Cognition, and the Ability to Stand Down

If anticipatory self-formatting is a regulatory process rather than a retrospective story, its onset and termination should be observable. The relevant temporal unit may be considerably smaller than the finished theory a person later gives about what occurred. A destabilizing event can rapidly alter bodily arousal, attentional breadth, speech tempo, memory retrieval, action readiness, social prediction, and the availability of explanatory cognition. The key empirical question is not necessarily which pure emotion occurred “before thought,” but how the system reorganized as the event became something to be understood and presented.

Contemporary interoceptive theory complicates any simple chronology in which bodily emotion first appears and cognition subsequently arrives to interpret it. Barrett and Simmons (2015), for example, propose that interoceptive experience reflects interaction between ascending bodily signals and predictive models rather than a one-directional passage from pristine sensation to later interpretation. That framework should not be treated as the final account of affective neuroscience, but it is sufficient to make a rigid feeling-first sequence theoretically unnecessary.

A more tractable design would measure what changes across the first seconds and minutes of cognitive mobilization. Does speech become more elaborated? Does the person begin producing contingencies or counterarguments? Does attention shift from immediate experience toward chronology and evidence? Does the urge to document increase? Most importantly, what changes once a coherent representation is achieved? If affect remains high but perceived dependence upon the receiver falls, that pattern would differ from a model in which cognition functions principally to suppress emotional intensity.

Repetitive-negative-thinking research creates a particularly important falsification threat at this point. Worry and rumination are transdiagnostic processes, and contemporary meta-control accounts explain persistence partly through difficulties terminating or shifting mental behavior (Hitchcock & Frank, 2024). Anticipatory self-formatting should therefore not be inferred from persistence itself. It may be brief, constructive, emotionally neutral, and highly effective. Conversely, what begins as proportionate preparation may become repetitive cognition once the informational and relational problem has ceased to change.

Termination is therefore theoretically as important as initiation. Regulatory-flexibility research increasingly emphasizes correspondence between strategy and context rather than fixed hierarchies of “good” and “bad” regulation (Sanchez-Lopez, 2021). Recent work across multiple samples also links greater regulatory flexibility with lower distress and higher positive functioning, while suggesting that flexibility is not well represented by the simple use of any single favored strategy (Werner et al., 2026). The implication for this article is straightforward: the developmental target cannot be reduced preparation. It must involve greater sensitivity to whether preparation remains necessary.

A problem can end externally while a cognitive mode remains active internally. The decision has been made, but monitoring continues; an argument has ended, but rebuttal persists; the work has become adequate, but refinement remains commissioned. Such persistence can arise from many sources—intrinsic reward, conscientiousness, anxiety, habit, grief, or genuine unfinished obligation—and anticipatory self-formatting should explain only the subset in which cessation would restore an unwanted degree of relational uncertainty or dependence. The key discriminator is whether the mode stands down when the receiving conditions change.

VIII. Psychotherapy as a High-Exposure Case

Psychotherapy concentrates the theoretical problem because the patient brings experience to another mind partly in the hope that this mind may perceive something unavailable from the patient’s own position. The patient possesses privileged access to lived experience, while the therapist contributes an external perspective, professional formation, and participation in the relationship from another vantage point. Neither position warrants epistemic sovereignty. Treatment depends upon allowing each mind to alter the other without converting either into the final authority over what the patient’s experience must mean.

Recognition consequently contains a structural vulnerability. To be understood is also to permit another person to construct a representation that exists partly outside one’s control. A therapist may remember differently, infer a motive the patient rejects, remain unconvinced by an explanation, identify a pattern the patient has not perceived, or become confidently committed to an interpretation that is wrong. Perfectly safe recognition would require accurate apprehension without any corresponding freedom on the part of the receiver to think something unexpected, a condition that consequential human relationships cannot supply.

Anticipatory self-formatting offers one possible way to reduce this exposure. A patient can arrive with chronology, hypotheses, counterevidence, relevant concepts, methodological cautions, and perhaps even an adversarial critique of the formulation they are presenting. Such preparation may improve therapy substantially by preventing valuable time from being consumed reconstructing information that could have been organized beforehand. The question is not whether the preparation is sophisticated but whether it changes what the therapeutic encounter remains capable of doing.

If the therapist’s primary role becomes evaluating, refining, or ratifying an already elaborated account, the patient may be using another mind without exposing the experience to much genuinely uncontrolled interpretation. The session remains relational, but the jurisdiction of the relation has narrowed. This is a testable proposition: highly prepared sessions should not be classified as defensive by inspection; rather, researchers would examine whether preparation predicts reduced willingness to revise, reduced tolerance for unexpected therapist interpretations, faster corrective behavior when misunderstood, or lower subjective dependence upon what occurs during the session.

Alliance-rupture research supplies an important but bounded source of evidence. Eubanks et al. (2018), analyzing 11 studies involving 1,314 patients, found a moderate association between successful rupture resolution and better treatment outcome. This does not show that misunderstanding is curative, that patients should endure inaccurate interpretations, or that tolerance of epistemic dependency causes therapeutic change. It establishes a narrower point: disagreement, strain, and misattunement do not have to be prevented in advance for a therapeutic relationship to remain viable.

The theory therefore predicts that change may sometimes appear not as improved self-explanation but as greater capacity to leave interpretive work genuinely open. A patient may become able to say that an interpretation feels wrong without needing immediately to reconstruct the entire record, to leave a session with an unresolved question, or to ask for help before knowing exactly what form of help will be useful. None of these behaviors is intrinsically mature. Their significance depends upon whether they represent a larger repertoire in a relationship that has earned sufficient trust.

Therapeutic authority remains constrained by the proportionality principle. A therapist who repeatedly misrecognizes a patient gives the patient reason to prepare more, not less. Receptive dependence is psychologically meaningful only when the receiver is sufficiently credible, bounded, and corrigible that allowing some uncertainty into the relationship is not equivalent to abandoning appropriate self-protection.

IX. Generative AI as a Relational Comparator

Generative AI creates a theoretically distinctive comparison condition because responsive linguistic interpretation can now be obtained without many of the reciprocal contingencies ordinarily attached to another human mind. Contemporary large language models can summarize experience, generate alternative explanations, distinguish observations from inferences, produce counterarguments, reorganize chronology, and help users formulate emotionally or conceptually difficult material. Systematic reviews published since the emergence of contemporary generative models document substantial experimentation across screening, psychoeducation, conversational support, assessment, and mental-health intervention, while repeatedly emphasizing methodological limitations, safety concerns, and the immaturity of the clinical evidence base (Guo et al., 2024; Wang et al., 2025).

The relational difference should not be overstated into a claim that AI is equivalent to a therapist or attachment figure. Yirmiya and Fonagy (2025), examining generative AI through mentalization and epistemic-trust theory, argue that current systems can simulate aspects of cognitive empathy and reflective dialogue while lacking genuine reciprocal intentionality, affective commitment, embodied synchrony, and ordinary mutual subjectivity. Those limitations are precisely what make AI useful as a comparator for the present theory: responsive interpretation is partly separated from reciprocity.

A user can reject an AI interpretation without ordinarily injuring it, ask the same question repeatedly without visible boredom, request many reformulations without incurring conventional interpersonal debt, and terminate the interaction without negotiating the future of a relationship. The system may be inaccurate, sycophantic, overconfident, or otherwise unsafe, but the user nevertheless retains unusual procedural control over when consultation begins, how often material is reformulated, which outputs are retained, and whether disagreement has lasting social consequences.

This yields a narrower and more defensible hypothesis than the claim that AI is becoming “a mind that can be needed safely.” Generative AI may sometimes function as a lower-reciprocity, higher-control precursor to consequential human reception. The proposition does not follow from existing AI mental-health research and should be tested rather than presumed. Convenience, speed, cost, availability, privacy, and task utility are powerful competing explanations for why users consult AI before speaking to another person.

The anticipatory-self-formatting account therefore requires relationally specific evidence. AI consultation should increase disproportionately before interactions in which another person’s interpretation is consequential, even after ordinary task difficulty and convenience are accounted for. Consultation should change not only what the user knows but how exposed they expect to feel during later human reception. The strongest evidence would involve a reduction in perceived dependence upon the human receiver without corresponding acquisition of new external facts.

The downstream direction should remain open. AI might increase receptive flexibility by converting chaotic experience into questions, generating rival hypotheses, and making difficult disclosures possible. Alternatively, it might produce a completed interpretive brief whose coherence makes the later human encounter less capable of changing the user’s view. Existing evidence is not sufficient to choose between these pathways.

This distinction also suggests why simple outcome studies of whether AI “helps” or “harms” mental health cannot resolve the present question. A conversation could reduce distress while increasing epistemic rigidity, or increase immediate uncertainty while improving later human openness. The relevant dependent variables are relational: willingness to disclose unfinished material, tolerance of contradictory human feedback, degree of pre-disclosure certainty, correction latency after disagreement, and the amount of interpretive work left for another person to perform.

X. A Process Model of Anticipatory Self-Formatting

The theoretical architecture can now be stated without treating anticipatory self-formatting as an established trait.

Figure 1 · Proposed process model

ENVIRONMENTAL CONDITIONS
Consequential evaluation · receiver discretion · dependency
low correctability · institutional power · prior misrecognition
                    │
                    │ moderated by
                    │ receiver credibility, actual stakes,
                    │ credibility environment, reversibility
                    ▼
APPRAISAL OF RELATIONAL ASYMMETRY
“How much of what happens next depends on
another person's interpretation or decision?”
                    │
                    ▼
COGNITIVE RECRUITMENT
chronology · evidence · explanatory modeling
counterarguments · qualification · contingency planning
language refinement · anticipated correction
                    │
                    ▼
IMMEDIATE CONSEQUENCES
greater intelligibility and defensibility
greater procedural preparedness
possible reduction in perceived interpretive exposure
                    │
          ┌─────────┴─────────┐
          ▼                   ▼
ADAPTIVE PREPARATION      OVERRECRUITMENT
tracks real stakes        persists beyond environmental need
increases dialogue        narrows revisability
supports action           reduces openness to receiver input
stands down               difficult termination
          │                   │
          └─────────┬─────────┘
                    ▼
LONGER-TERM OUTCOME
receptive flexibility or increasing dependence
on private cognitive control

Person-level variables such as intolerance of uncertainty, attachment orientation, perfectionistic self-presentation, repetitive-negative-thinking propensity, prior experiences of misrecognition, and trait cognitive intensity are not positioned as competing causes that must be absent. They are expected to moderate or partially mediate the process. The incremental claim is that features of relational asymmetry itself explain additional variance in preparatory behavior and its consequences.

The model also distinguishes environmental adaptation from generalized recruitment. Where actual stakes are high, correctability is low, or credibility conditions are poor, the same preparatory behavior may occupy the adaptive pathway. Overrecruitment is inferred only where preparation becomes insensitive to improved receiving conditions or where its costs to revision and dialogue exceed its instrumental benefits.

XI. Operationalization: What Would Count as Evidence?

A theory of anticipatory self-formatting should not begin by creating a broad self-report trait scale. Items such as “I prepare extensively before difficult conversations” or “I need to explain myself clearly” would almost certainly alias with conscientiousness, intolerance of uncertainty, perfectionism, attachment avoidance, social anxiety, and repetitive negative thinking. Premature scale development would therefore risk manufacturing the discriminant-validity problem rather than solving it.

The first empirical task should be process identification. Evidence should come from experimentally manipulated relational conditions, observable preparatory behavior, state-level regulatory changes, and subsequent openness to receiver input. A trait measure becomes justified only after a relationally specific process has been demonstrated independently.

Table 2 · Provisional operational architecture

Theoretical component	Candidate manipulation or measure	Critical prediction
Consequential relational asymmetry	Receiver controls meaningful outcome vs. receives information only	Greater preparation when receiver possesses consequential discretion
Informational uncertainty	Match ambiguity and missing information across conditions	Relational effect survives equivalent objective uncertainty
Receiver credibility	Reliable/corrigible vs. unreliable/difficult-to-correct receiver history	Preparation decreases with credible receivers if process is context-sensitive
Impression valence	Disclosure makes participant look favorable, unfavorable, or ambiguous	Relational effect persists when favorable impression is not obtainable
Self-verification	Feedback congruent vs. incongruent with established self-view	ASF effect survives when self-view congruence is held constant
Preparation intensity	Time, revision count, evidence units, counterarguments, contingency statements	Increases as relational asymmetry rises
Interpretive openness	Number of receiver-generated alternatives considered; revision after feedback	Overrecruitment predicts reduced subsequent revision
Immediate regulatory consequence	State helplessness, action uncertainty, perceived dependence on receiver before/after preparation	Dependence-related ratings fall after preparation without new external information
Termination flexibility	Continued editing/research after adequacy threshold or receiver credibility improvement	Flexible individuals reduce preparation when need declines
Proportionality	Objective stakes, prior receiver reliability, institutional cost of error	“Excess” preparation is residualized against environmental demand
AI comparator	AI consultation before human disclosure; procedural control and reciprocity manipulated or measured	AI use tracks relational exposure above convenience/task difficulty

The outcome variables should include behavior rather than relying solely upon introspective explanations. Preparation time, number of substantive revisions, quantity of anticipatory objections, frequency of evidentiary qualifiers, contingency generation, and willingness to submit an account before reaching a self-selected adequacy threshold can all be observed. Subsequent receptivity can be measured through the extent to which participants revise their account after credible contrary feedback, how quickly they attempt to correct an unexpected interpretation, and whether they permit the receiver to generate hypotheses not already contained in the prepared representation.

Subjective measures remain useful but should be decomposed. Rather than asking participants whether they were “defensive,” investigators could assess how much the desired outcome depends upon the receiver, how costly misunderstanding would be, how correctable an inaccurate interpretation seems, how prepared the person feels to respond to disagreement, and how much they still need the receiver’s judgment after preparation. Existing measures of intolerance of uncertainty, perfectionistic self-presentation, attachment orientation, epistemic trust, repetitive negative thinking, and need for closure would then provide discriminant controls.

An initial study program

A first experiment should manipulate relational asymmetry while holding informational uncertainty constant. Participants could receive an ambiguous interpersonal case requiring preparation for one of several conditions: private analysis, explanation to a receiver who has no decision authority, or explanation to an evaluator whose judgment determines a meaningful outcome. Receiver reliability and correctability could be manipulated orthogonally. The principal outcome would be preparation intensity and its effect on perceived dependence. The core hypothesis would fail if evaluator authority does not increase preparation beyond uncertainty and evaluative concern, or if receiver credibility does not moderate the effect.

A second experiment should separate anticipatory self-formatting from impression management and self-verification. Participants could prepare disclosures that are favorable, unfavorable, or genuinely ambiguous, while stable self-view congruence is assessed independently. If preparation is driven principally by impression management, unfavorable admissions should sharply reduce the effect. If self-verification is sufficient, the effect should depend principally upon whether the expected receiver response confirms existing self-beliefs. The present theory instead predicts that consequential receiver discretion will increase preparation across valence conditions, particularly when misinterpretation is costly and difficult to correct.

A third program should examine dyadic reception rather than preparation alone. After participants prepare material, a trained partner or clinician analogue would introduce either expected or unexpected interpretations varying in credibility. Researchers could measure physiological activation, correction latency, willingness to entertain the alternative, account revision, and postinteraction relationship judgments. This design would test whether extensive preparation is associated with reduced capacity to use the receiver’s contribution or whether, under some conditions, preparation actually facilitates greater openness.

A fourth study should use ecological momentary assessment around naturally occurring consequential disclosures. Participants would record interpersonal stakes, anticipated credibility, preparation behaviors, AI use, affect, and perceived dependency before conversations with partners, clinicians, supervisors, or other important receivers; brief follow-ups would assess whether the actual conversation changed the person’s model. This design would help determine whether laboratory effects generalize and whether preparation tracks real environmental risk.

Only after such process evidence exists should researchers consider constructing a trait-level measure. A defensible scale would need to predict behavioral preparation under relational asymmetry beyond established measures and would require factor analytic, longitudinal, convergent, discriminant, and incremental-validity evidence. Until then, anticipatory self-formatting is better treated as a hypothesized process than as a trait people either possess or lack.

XII. Falsifiers and Boundary Conditions

A theory of sophisticated self-interpretation requires unusually explicit failure conditions because its subject matter makes retrospective confirmation easy. Several observations would substantially weaken or eliminate the proposed process.

If equivalent levels of uncertainty produce equivalent preparation regardless of whether another person possesses consequential interpretive discretion, the relational-specific claim fails. If perfectionistic self-presentation, impression-management motivation, self-verification, attachment avoidance, intolerance of uncertainty, and repetitive negative thinking jointly explain the relevant variance, a separate construct is unnecessary. If preparation produces no state change in perceived dependency, controllability, or exposure until genuinely new information is obtained, the regulatory-labor hypothesis weakens. If trusted, competent, readily correctable receivers evoke the same level of preparation as unreliable or consequentially powerful receivers, the proportionality component fails.

Likewise, repeated comfortable reliance upon competent others would weaken a broad defensive-autonomy interpretation; extensive cognition during safe, solitary, intrinsically rewarding activities would increase the explanatory weight of temperament; and AI consultation that consistently increases uncertainty tolerance, openness to human disagreement, and willingness to disclose psychologically unfinished material would count against a simple buffering account of AI use.

The theory also predicts heterogeneity rather than universality. Some people may regulate uncertainty through withdrawal rather than preparation, reassurance seeking rather than self-formatting, affect suppression rather than explanation, or rapid deference rather than private modeling. Anticipatory self-formatting therefore should not become a total theory of how intelligence relates to vulnerability. Its scientific value depends upon explaining a bounded pattern better than competing accounts.

XIII. Receptive Flexibility

The easiest way to corrupt this argument would be to transform it into a morality play in which autonomy is defensive, dependence is mature, preparation is pathological, and spontaneity is authentic. Nothing in the relevant literature justifies such a hierarchy. Autonomy, documentation, privacy, verification, competence, and skepticism are legitimate human goods. Institutions can be unreliable, receivers can misuse authority, and some relationships punish precisely the forms of incompletion that a therapeutic ideal might romanticize.

The positive target must therefore be defined through flexibility rather than through any preferred outward behavior. Receptive flexibility refers to the capacity to preserve agency while permitting contextually warranted forms of dependence, influence, uncertainty, and incompletion. It includes the ability to prepare rigorously when stakes justify preparation, to accept competent assistance without unnecessarily retaking control, to revise one’s account when credible external information arrives, and to terminate regulatory cognition when the environment no longer requires it.

This formulation aligns with broader regulatory-flexibility work, which increasingly emphasizes correspondence between strategy and situational demand rather than treating individual strategies as intrinsically adaptive or maladaptive (Sanchez-Lopez, 2021; Werner et al., 2026). Receptive flexibility is narrower, however, because its domain is relational reception. The relevant question is whether another person’s contribution can matter without either being treated as sovereign or being reduced in advance to a tightly controlled role.

A counterfeit version of receptive flexibility deserves explicit attention. Once a psychologically sophisticated person learns that extensive preparation can be defensive, unfinishedness itself can become a performance. One can arrive strategically confused, suppress prior analysis as evidence of growth, or cultivate visible vulnerability because vulnerability has become the form most likely to be approved by a therapist or intimate other. Such behavior would reproduce the original mechanism at a higher level: the self would again be formatted in advance, except that “authentic incompletion” rather than coherence had become the desired representation.

No visible behavior can therefore certify the positive condition. Preparation, nonpreparation, autonomy, dependence, opacity, disclosure, cognition, and affective immediacy can each be adaptive or defensive depending upon context and function. The relevant criterion is whether the person possesses a sufficiently broad repertoire to respond differently when circumstances differ.

This changes the meaning of freedom within the theory. Freedom cannot consist only in preventing another person from acquiring consequential influence, because relationships capable of recognition, intimacy, mentorship, collaboration, and care necessarily permit other minds to matter. A person who successfully eliminates every dependency, every uncontrollable interpretation, every obligation, and every attachment capable of producing grief may have achieved formidable protection while also reducing the conditions under which another person could become genuinely consequential.

The developmental issue is therefore not whether dependence can be abolished but whether it can become selective, bounded, and survivable. Another person’s misunderstanding may hurt without determining the self; care may create gratitude without becoming annexation; influence may alter one’s view without becoming sovereignty; and uncertainty may remain present long enough for another mind to contribute something that private cognition could not have generated in advance.

Conclusion: Before I Am Received

Sophisticated cognition deserves neither romanticization nor suspicion. It can discover, create, protect, clarify, and solve, while under some conditions the same capacities may also become part of the regulatory infrastructure through which exposure to another mind is managed. The two functions are compatible. A theory can be intellectually valid and psychologically regulating; preparation can be prudent and simultaneously reduce dependency; a commitment to autonomy can be principled while becoming overrecruited in particular relational conditions.

Anticipatory self-formatting is offered here not as an established trait but as a candidate process whose scientific value depends upon surviving reduction. Its strongest claim is narrow: when uncertainty becomes consequential partly because another person retains discretionary interpretive power, some individuals may increase preparatory cognition in ways that reduce their subsequent dependence upon that person’s uncontrolled contribution. The hypothesis gains force only if relational asymmetry explains behavior beyond impression management, perfectionistic self-presentation, self-verification, uncertainty intolerance, repetitive negative thinking, attachment avoidance, anticipatory coping, and overcontrol.

The theory is correspondingly disciplined by proportionality. Preparation that accurately tracks unreliable receivers, institutional stakes, or credibility deficits is not evidence of psychopathology simply because it is extensive. The relevant problem arises when cognitive protection loses sensitivity to the environment—when a mode built for unreliable reception remains fully commissioned in relationships that have become trustworthy, corrigible, and capable of carrying uncertainty without exploiting it.

If the hypothesis survives empirical testing, its most consequential evidence may not be an increasingly elaborate theory of the self. It may be visible in smaller changes: a credible other is allowed to carry part of an unresolved problem; an unexpected interpretation can be considered before it is corrected; assistance can be received without immediate compensatory control; a project can end when its purpose has been met; or an experience can enter a conversation before every implication has been modeled.

The point is not to become unprepared. It is to acquire the ability to distinguish when preparation serves reality from when preparation has begun to substitute for relation.

A mind that has become exceptionally capable of constructing the environment that holds experience need not surrender that capacity. The further achievement is more demanding: to know when another credible mind can be allowed to hold something before one’s own has finished organizing it, and to discover that participation in one’s meaning does not require possession of the person whose meaning remains unfinished.

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GOVERNANCE STATUS · PUBLIC CONCEPTUAL PAPER

Anticipatory self-formatting is presented here as a candidate relational-regulatory process, not as an established trait or validated diagnostic construct. The paper is substantively complete for public release; later changes should be limited to factual, citation, bibliographic, accessibility, formatting, or explicit research-status corrections unless a substantive reopening is declared.

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