The importance of dimensional approaches for conceptualizing and assessing transdiagnostic mechanisms that confer risk for psychopathology has become increasingly recognized within the field of affect science. Worry and rumination are characterized as negative self-referential processes, both of which are underlying mechanisms of distress disorders, however there is disagreement among clinical scientists regarding whether worry and rumination are unitary or distinguishable constructs.
The present study sought to examine the transdiagnostic mechanisms of worry and rumination using subjective and biobehavioral assessments of emotional processing with the overarching goal of examining whether electrocortical responses to emotional images indexed by three event-related potentials (N1, EPN, LPP) were moderated by individual differences in trait- and state-levels of worry and rumination. Participants (N = 99) were undergraduate students that completed self-report measures assessing trait and state levels of worry and rumination, followed by a passive view task comprised of emotional images (i.e., threat, affiliative, erotic, mutilation), during which their electrocortical activity was recorded.
Findings showed that rumination at the trait-level and state-level exhibited a pattern of findings that varied based on the specificity of emotional content, with a significant interaction between trait rumination and emotional image type occurring during early stages of emotional processing (indexed by N1 reactivity), and a significant interaction between state rumination and emotional image type occurring during later stages of emotional processing (indexed by late LPP reactivity). These discriminative patterns on neural markers of emotional reactivity that were specific to rumination but not worry lend support to conceptualizations of these negative repetitive thinking styles as being distinct constructs, highlighting the importance of capturing nuances in temporal dynamics with subjective and biobehavioral assessments to elucidate the complex underpinnings of these maladaptive processes.
Taken together, this study shows promise in contributing to the field by addressing gaps in extant literature considering that there are no studies to date that have incorporated these three ERP components specifically to examine the role of trait worry and rumination as well as state worry and rumination on emotional processing. Future studies that concurrently examine trait-level and state-level worry and rumination are needed given the role that these transdiagnostic mechanisms have in the prevention, etiology, and treatment of distress disorders.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:columbia.edu/oai:academiccommons.columbia.edu:10.7916/123s-rd45 |
| Date | January 2025 |
| Creators | Quintero, Jean Marie |
| Source Sets | Columbia University |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Theses |
Page generated in 0.0021 seconds