Current research proposes that rumination, perseverating on thoughts about one's feelings and problems, predicts the severity, likelihood, and duration of depression (Nolen-Hoeksema, 2000; Spasojevic & Alloy, 2001). One factor that might affect rumination outcomes is the level of abstraction one adopts when thinking about negative experiences. A growing body of research demonstrates that adopting a non-abstract, concrete perspective (e.g., focusing on specific details and sensations) reduces rumination (e.g., Watkins, Baeyens, & Read, 2009). Additionally, some empirical evidence suggests that abstract thinking (e.g., focusing on values, meaning, and general concepts) increases rumination when focusing on negative content (e.g., Watkins, 2004). In contrast, other experimental studies suggest that there are types of abstract processing that reduce rumination (Kross & Ayduk 2008; Rude, Mazzetti, Pal, & Stauble, 2011). This study built on the research supporting positive effects of abstract processing. The primary aim of this study was to determine if there are types of abstract processing that, when used in conjunction with concrete processing, can reduce rumination and can do so to a greater extent than concrete processing alone. Participants were asked to examine negative experiences that were particularly bothersome and write about them from one of three perspectives: a) a mixed condition that encouraged participants to explore their abstract values and connect them to concrete thoughts and actions; b) a concrete condition that encouraged thinking only about concrete thoughts and actions; and c) a control condition that directed participants to write about their daily routines. A sample of 252 college students completed measures of rumination, OGM, and depression at pre-intervention, post-intervention, and a two week follow-up. Results indicated that the treatment effects significantly interacted with initial depression, such that participants who had high initial levels of depression had significantly lower rumination and depression in the mixed and concrete conditions compared to the control condition following the intervention. Findings suggest that treatment differences in depression were meditated by changes in rumination. The limitations and implications of the results are discussed in the context of the current literature. / text

The focus of the thesis is the investigation of the causal nature of the established association between rumination and that ability to resolve interference from task-irrelevant information, and prepotent responses. Rumination is a term used to refer to both unhelpful dwelling on negative moods and depressive symptoms (e.g., Nolen-Hoeksema, 1991), and repetitive intrusive thoughts around the theme of unresolved personal goals (Martin & Tesser, 1996). It has been proposed that rumination occupies working memory resources, thereby depleting cognitive control capabilities necessary for the performance of concurrent effortful tasks (Hartlage, Alloy, Vasquez, & Dykman, 1993; Hertel, 2004; Watkins & Brown, 2002). This model constitutes one possible account of the considerable data demonstrating an association between depressive rumination and deficits on tasks invoking inhibitory processes (Joormann, Yoon, & Gotlib, 2007). An inhibition construct is invoked to account for the empirical observation of interference; however there are few instances where inhibition is unambiguously driving interference (MacLeod, 2007). Moreover, there is evidence that inhibition is not a unitary construct (Friedman & Miyake, 2004). Five experiments manipulated rumination on depressive symptoms and on personal goals in dysphoric and unselected samples in order to test Watkins and Brown’s (2002) hypothesis that state rumination impairs interference control capabilities. The causal impact of state rumination was examined on interference control tasks that implicate different inhibitory sub-types: resistance to proactive interference from positive and negative material (Studies One, Two, and Five), and prepotent response inhibition on a go/no-go paradigm (Studies Three and Four). No evidence was found to support the prediction that state rumination about depressed mood (Studies One and Two) or on-going personal goal discrepancies (Study Five) causes difficulties resolving interference from irrelevant emotional material relative to non-ruminative control conditions in both dysphoric (Studies One and Two) and unselected (Study Five) samples. No evidence was found to support the prediction that state rumination about personal goal discrepancies impairs prepotent response inhibition relative to non-ruminative control conditions (Studies Three and Four). There was some tentative evidence to suggest that ruminating on personal goal discrepancies increased efficiency in holding a single goal active in working memory without reinforcement (Study Four). The implications of these findings for existing models of the causal nature of the relationship between rumination and interference control processes is discussed (Chapter Nine). It is concluded that models proposing a causal impact of state rumination on available working memory capacity are insufficient to fully account for the established association between the trait tendency to ruminate and increased susceptibility to interference from irrelevant material.

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Shame and self-criticism are closely related constructs that have strong associations with many forms of psychopathology as well as general psychological distress. Rumination is a maladaptive form of repetitive thinking that is associated with a number of psychological disorders. Although measures of many different types of rumination (e.g. depressive rumination, angry rumination) have been developed, none assess self-critical rumination. The purpose of the present study, therefore, was to develop a measure of self-critical rumination. An initial pool of items for the Self-Critical Rumination Scale (SCRS) was developed by adapting existing rumination measures and through a writing task administered to both student and clinical samples. Following an evaluation of content validity, a total of 24 items remained in the item pool. These items were then administered to a large sample of undergraduates along with measures of related constructs. Psychometric properties of the Self-Critical Rumination Scale (SCRS) were examined including internal consistency, factor structure, and convergent and discriminant relationships with related constructs. Regression analyses were then performed in which scores on the SCRS were used to predict several different indicators of psychological distress. The SCRS significantly predicted symptoms of borderline personality disorder and overall general distress.

The current study investigated the relation between academic rumination and achievement goal orientation using hierarchical regression. One hundred and ninety-six first year undergraduate students completed measures of depressive symptoms (BDI), achievement goal orientation (PALS) and rumination (MDRS). Analysis revealed that participants adopting performance-avoid goals were more likely to engage in brooding and reflective ruminative responses to stressful academic situations, while those reporting adopting mastery goal orientations were more likely to report lower brooding scores in stressful academic situations. Further analysis revealed that the relation between academic rumination and achievement goal orientation extended beyond a shared relationship with depressive symptoms. These findings are a first step in demonstrating a relationship between academic rumination and achievement goal orientations which may help to improve motivational intervention programs that assist students in adopting mastery goals as well as coping with stressful academic situations. / Graduate

Rumination has been shown to be an influential part of the depressive experience, impacting on various cognitive processes including memory and attention. However, there is a dearth of studies examining the relationship between rumination and emotion recognition, deficits or biases in which have been closely linked to a depressive mood state. In Study 1, participants (N = 89) received either a rumination or distraction induction prior to completing three variants of an emotion recognition task assessing decoding accuracy or biases. Results demonstrated that greater levels of dysphoria were associated with poorer facial emotion recognition accuracy, but only when participants were induced to ruminate (as opposed to being induced to distract). The aim of Study 2 (N = 172) was to examine a possible mechanism, namely cognitive load, by which rumination affects emotion recognition. Results from this study indicated that participants endorsing greater levels of dysphoria were less accurate on an emotion recognition task when they received either a rumination induction or a cognitive load task compared to their counterparts who received a distraction induction. Importantly, the performance of those in the cognitive load and rumination conditions did not differ from each other. In summary, these findings suggest that the confluence of dysphoria and rumination can influence individuals’ accuracy in identifying emotional content portrayed in facial expressions. Furthermore, rumination, by definition an effortful process, might negatively impact emotion recognition via the strain it places on cognitive resources.

Attentional bias is commonly associated with emotional disorders. However, potential transdiagnostic mediators of attentional bias, such as repetitive negative thinking (RNT) have been overlooked. The current study examined attentional biases associated with three forms of RNT and tested a proposed mediation model. Participants (N = 249) completed self-report measures, a repetitive thought induction, and an emotional face dot-probe measure of attentional bias. I hypothesized that RNT would be associated with attentional bias to angry, sad, and disgust faces, worry with angry faces, and rumination with sad faces after a negative thought induction. I also hypothesized that attentional bias scores would mediate the association between negative affect and RNT. Overall study hypotheses were not supported. Clinical worry was associated with slower reaction times to sad faces in the negative induction. RNT, worry, and rumination were not associated with attentional bias scores to emotional faces, and the mediation model was not supported.

The primary aim of this thesis was to investigate the relationship between rumination and selective attention, in particular, whether the tendency to ruminate is associated with impaired attentional disengagement from negative information. It is well-established that the tendency to ruminate in response to negative mood is a key vulnerability factor in the development of depression (Nolen-Hoekseman, Wisco, & Lyubomirsky, 2008; Watkins, 2008), but attempts to understand the underlying processes contributing to heightened ruminative disposition have been relatively limited. Recently, a number of researchers have suggested that rumination may be characterised by biased attentional processing of negative information, particularly that individuals with high levels of ruminative disposition may have difficulty disengaging their attention from negative information (e.g., Koster, De Lissnyder, Derakshan, & De Raedt, 2011). Studies One and Two each investigated the relationship between individual differences in ruminative disposition and selective attention for negative information, using a modified dot-probe task designed by Grafton, Watkins, and MacLeod (2012) to enable the discrete assessment of biases in attentional engagement and disengagement. Study One found that heightened levels of dispositional ruminative brooding, as assessed by both the Ruminative Responses Scale (RRS; Nolen-Hoeksema & Morrow, 1991) and an in-vivo assessment of ruminative disposition, were associated with impaired attentional disengagement from negative relative to positive information. Similarly, Study Two also found that heightened levels of ruminative disposition were associated with impaired attentional disengagement from negative information, particularly for depression relevant stimuli presented for 1000ms. Study Three sought to extend these findings using an eye-tracking assessment of selective attention to measure the spontaneous allocation of attention between stimuli. However, ruminative disposition was not significantly associated with any index of attentional bias during the eye-tracking assessment, neither with biased attentional disengagement, nor with biased attentional engagement or maintenance of attention. Study Four then sought to replicate findings from Study Two using a selected sample of individuals with high and low levels of ruminative disposition. Participants in the high rumination group demonstrated greater attentional bias for depression relevant negative stimuli presented for 1000ms in comparison to those in the low rumination group. However, this between group difference reflected a general attentional preference for negative relative to positive stimuli (i.e., composite of attentional engagement and disengagement bias), but no specific difference in attentional disengagement bias or attentional engagement bias was observed. Finally, Study Five took a first step towards investigate the causal relationship between rumination and selective attention by investigating the causal effect of rumination on attentional bias. Although there no main effect of induced rumination on attentional bias was observed, the effect of induced rumination on attentional bias was found to be moderated by ruminative disposition. However, contrary to hypotheses, individuals with low levels of ruminative disposition demonstrated an attentional bias for valence-incongruent stimuli, which shifted to a bias for valence-congruent stimuli as ruminative disposition increased. Overall, there was support across the studies for the primary hypothesis that heightened ruminative disposition is associated with impaired attentional disengagement from negative information. However, the findings do not suggest that ruminative disposition is exclusively associated with attentional disengagement bias, but instead indicate that facilitated attentional engagement may also be involved under some circumstances.

Extensive work has examined the relationship between rumination and executive functioning (EF) mainly in adult samples, lending support for theory that rumination is characterized by poorer shifting, inhibition, and/or working memory updating abilities. However, literature on the relationship between rumination and EF in youth is more equivocal. Further, the directionality of this relationship is somewhat unclear, and may differ as a function of EF type. The present study conducted a longitudinal, bidirectional examination of the relationship between rumination on both negative and positive affect and several types of EF in a sample of 175 youth (aged 9-13) at baseline, 9-month, and 18-month follow-up assessments. Although rumination was not associated with shifting, inhibition, and/or working memory, support generally emerged for significant concurrent relationships between rumination and greater problems with inhibition, planning/organization, and monitoring. There was minimal support for significant longitudinal relationships between rumination and EF, and no evidence emerged for relationships between rumination on positive affect and EF. The present study provides some support for a “common cause” model of the relationship between rumination and EF (e.g., depressive symptoms; shared neurobiological dysfunction), although more research is needed to examine longitudinal relationships between these constructs. / Psychology

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