“Asking why” from a distance: Its cognitive and emotional consequences for people with major depressive disorder.

Abstract

Although analyzing negative experiences leads to physical and mental health benefits among healthy populations, when people with depression engage in this process on their own they often ruminate and feel worse. Here we examine whether it is possible for adults with depression to analyze their feelings adaptively if they adopt a self-distanced perspective. We examined this issue by randomly assigning depressed and nondepressed adults to analyze their feelings surrounding a depressing life experience from either a self-distanced or a self-immersed perspective and then examined the implications of these manipulations for depressotypic thought accessibility, negative affect, implicit and explicit avoidance, and thought content. Four key results emerged. First, all participants were capable of self-distancing while analyzing their feelings. Second, participants who analyzed their feelings from a self-distanced perspective showed lower levels of depressotypic thought accessibility and negative affect compared to their self-immersed counterparts. Third, analyzing negative feelings from a self-distanced perspective led to an adaptive shift in the way people construed their experience--they recounted the emotionally arousing details of their experience less and reconstrued them in ways that promoted insight and closure. It did not promote avoidance. Finally, self-distancing did not influence negative affect or depressotypic thought accessibility among nondepressed participants. These findings suggest that whether depressed adults' attempts to analyze negative feelings lead to adaptive or maladaptive consequences may depend critically on whether they do so from a self-immersed or a self-distanced perspective.

This too shall pass: Temporal distance and the regulation of emotional distress.

“…While depressive symptoms did not significantly moderate the link between temporal distancing and reduced distress, temporal distancing was found to be more effective at reducing the distress of individuals high in worry. This finding suggests that temporal distancing may have more pronounced benefits for people prone to emotional distress, a possibility consistent with prior theory and research on the emotion-regulatory consequences of perspective-broadening reappraisal strategies Kross, Gard, Deldin, Clifton, & Ayduk, 2012;Schartau et al, 2009). If future research demonstrates that temporal distancing techniques work effectively for clinical populations, they could easily be incorporated into existing training interventions and therapy protocols.…”

“…On the other hand, prior research suggests that other types of psychological distancing strategies (i.e., self-distancing) may have more pronounced benefits for individuals prone to emotional distress, such as those with Major Depressive Disorder Kross, Gard, Deldin, Clifton, & Ayduk, 2012). Could this also be the case for temporal distancing?…”

Self-talk as a regulatory mechanism: How you do it matters

“…This is consistent with research indicating that adopting a visual selfdistanced perspective to analyze one's feelings does not promote cognitive avoidance (Ayduk & Kross, 2010b;, 2009Kross, Gard, Deldin, Clifton, & Ayduk, 2012). We also failed to find a significant effect of language use on audience perspective taking, which suggests that using non first person language to reflect on one's feelings does not differentially prime people to think about how they appear in the eyes of others compared to first person language use.…”

“…We did not examine the moderating role of trait social anxiety on avoidance because we observed a floor effect on this variable in both of the studies that assessed it. Prior research indicates that vulnerable individuals (i.e., those who score high on individual difference measures of depression or bipolar disorder) benefit as much, or more, from reflecting on emotional experiences from a visual self-distanced perspective as nonvulnerable individuals (Gruber et al, 2009;Kross & Ayduk, 2009;Kross et al, 2012;Wisco & Nolen-Hoeksema, 2011). Extrapolating from these findings, we expected people who scored high on trait social anxiety to benefit as much or more from engaging in non-first-person self-talk as people who scored low on trait social anxiety on each of the dependent measures we examined.…”

Neural markers of positive reappraisal and their associations with trait reappraisal and worry.

“…Affective disorder research provides some support for the notion that individual differences in psychopathology may have little effect on positive reappraisal implementation in the lab. Behavioral evidence indicates, for example, that when anxious and depressed people are asked to implement strategies that involve different reappraisal operations, they can be successful (Campbell-Sills, Barlow, Brown, & Hofmann, 2006;Ehring, Tuschen-Caffier, Schnülle, Fischer, & Gross, 2010; also see, Kross & Ayduk, 2009;Kross, Gard, Deldin, Clifton, & Ayduk, 2012). Such patients also respond well to therapies whose primary technique is cognitive reappraisal (Clark & Beck, 2010).…”