Is Rumination General or Specific to Negative Mood States? The Relationship between Rumination and Distraction and Depressed, Anxious, and Angry Moods in Women

Rumination has been found to play a role in negative affect by either maintaining or increasing depressive, anxious, and angry moods, whereas distraction has been found to decrease these negative moods. This experiment tested the hypothesis that the effect of rumination occurs across mood states and is not specific to one type of negative mood, using both Nolen-Hoeksema¿s Response Styles Theory (RST; 1991), and Bower¿s Associative Network Theory (1981; ANT). The impact of rumination and distraction on depressed, anxious, and angry mood states were examined in 90 women at the University of Missouri ¿ St. Louis. Participants were randomly placed in 1of 3 mood inductions (depressed, anxious, or angry), and in either a rumination or distraction response task. Mood was assessed using the Profile of Mood Scales, Brief Form (POMS-B; McNair, Lorr, & Droppleman, 1992) at 3 times; baseline, post-mood induction, and post-response task. Consistent with Bower¿s ANT (1981), repeated measures multivariate analyses of variance showed that all negative moods increased following the negative mood induction, regardless of the particular mood induced. However, the data did not fully support Nolan-Hoeksema¿s RST (1991); negative mood did not increase following the rumination task, but instead decreased. Following the distraction task, mood was significantly lower than at baseline, suggesting that distraction appeared to have some positive induction qualities. Overall, these findings support Bower¿s ANT and offer only partial support for Nolen-Hoeksema¿s RST; potential alternative explanations for the results are discussed

Gender Specific Disruptions in Emotion Processing in Younger Adults with Depression

Background: One of the principal theories regarding the biological basis of major depressive disorder (MDD) implicates a dysregulation of emotion-processing circuitry. Gender differences in how emotions are processed and relative experience with emotion processing might help to explain some of the disparities in the prevalence of MDD between women and men. This study sought to explore how gender and depression status relate to emotion processing. Methods: This study employed a 2 (MDD status) × 2 (gender) factorial design to explore differences in classifications of posed facial emotional expressions (N=151). Results: For errors, there was an interaction between gender and depression status. Women with MDD made more errors than did nondepressed women and men with MDD, particularly for fearful and sad stimuli (Ps Ps P=.01). Men with MDD, conversely, performed similarly to control men (P=.61). Conclusions: These results provide novel and intriguing evidence that depression in younger adults (years) differentially disrupts emotion processing in women as compared to men. This interaction could be driven by neurobiological and social learning mechanisms, or interactions between them, and may underlie differences in the prevalence of depression in women and men. Depression and Anxiety, 2009. Published 2008 Wiley-Liss, Inc

Co-variation between stressful events and rumination predicts depressive symptoms : an eighteen months prospective design in undergraduates

Rumination is a maladaptive form of emotion regulation and seems to be the cognitive mechanism linking stress to depressive symptoms. However, it remains to be investigated whether individuals' variation in rumination in relation to the occurrence of stressful events (e.g., phasic co-variation between stressful events and rumination) prospectively predict the experience of depressive symptoms in lengthy follow-up moments. In this eighteen months prospective design, a large unselected sample of undergraduates was tested before, during, and after a period with prominent naturally occurring stressful events. The multilevel results show that the co-variation of stressful events and ruminative thinking predicts the experience of depressive symptoms at 3 and 15 months follow up moments, also when statistically controlling for baseline depressive symptoms. Moreover, the data demonstrate that the phasic elevations of rumination in relation to the occurrence of stressful events are more predictive of depressive symptoms compared with the stable aspects of rumination measured at one occasion. At the clinical level, the current findings seem to suggest a process-oriented intervention to target the phasic ruminative cognitions where individuals need to learn to control rumination exactly at moments of stress. (C) 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved

Is rumination after bereavement linked with loss avoidance? : Evidence from eye-tracking

Funding: This research was funded by a Zon-MW TOP Grant of the Dutch Society for Scientific Research (NWO) under Grant number 91208009. Website: www.zonmw.nl. The funders had no role in the study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish or preparation of the manuscript.Peer reviewedPublisher PD

The Effects of Emotion-Focused versus Instrumental Rumination on the Provision of Social Support

Victims of negative events often report that they do not receive the expected and desired social support (e.g., Dunkel-Schetter, 1984). The current study investigated the impact of two types of victim rumination and gender role expectations on support provision and receipt. Using a 2 (Instrumental vs. Emotion-Focused Rumination) x 2 (Victim Gender) x 2 (Participant Gender) between-subjects factorial design, 136 undergraduate students interacted with one of four "burglary victims" for eight minutes, providing both behavioral and questionnaire data. Results suggest that instrumental ruminators receive more support than emotion-focused ruminators. Women provided more support to victims than did men. Additionally, male victims' coping was evaluated more positively than female victims' coping, regardless of rumination type

Mental Rumination: How Unwanted and Recurrent Thoughts Can Perturbate the Purchasing Behavior.

Martin and Tesser (1989) proposed a “rumination theory” to describe an unintentional and recurrent cognitive process where the individuals dwell on recurrent negative thoughts despite the absence of immediate environmental cueing. Their motivational approach presents rumination as a counterproductive thinking process triggered by the detection of a perturbation in one’s goal attainment process. This theory has received substantial attention in clinical psychology, but has not been documented in the literature on consumer behavior. Therefore, this paper aims first at synthesizing the current body of research on rumination and second at suggesting directions for research in marketing.rumination; consumer behavior; decision making process;