Brooding rumination and attentional biases in currently non-depressed individuals: an eye-tracking study

Abstract

Both rumination and attentional biases have been proposed as key components of the RDoC Negative Valence Systems construct of Loss. Although theorists have proposed that rumination, particularly brooding rumination, should be associated with increased sustained attention to depression-relevant information, it is not clear whether this link would be observed in a non-depressed sample or whether it is specific to brooding versus reflective rumination. To address these questions, the current study examined the link between brooding rumination and attentional biases in a sample of non-depressed individuals (n = 105). Attentional biases were assessed using eye tracking during a passive viewing task in which participants were presented with 2 × 2 arrays of angry, happy, sad, and neutral faces. In line with predictions, higher levels of brooding rumination were associated with greater sustained attention to sad faces and less sustained attention to happy faces. These results remained significant after controlling for participants’ prior history of major depression and current nonclinical level of depressive symptoms, suggesting that the link between brooding rumination and attentional biases is at least partially independent of current or past depression.

Not wallowing in misery – retractions of negative misinformation are effective in depressive rumination

“…Consistent with Experiment 1, a retraction was effective in the high-DR group for negative misinformation only. This finding may be attributed to the salience of the negative misinformation, based on an attentional bias towards negative information in depressive ruminators (E. P. Chang et al, 2017;Koster, De Raedt, Leyman, & De Lissnyder, 2010;Owens & Gibb, 2017). This is in line with the notion that misinformation that is more salient at the time of its correction is more easily retracted (Ecker et al, 2017), potentially due to enhanced coactivation (Kendeou et al, 2014) and/or conflict detection (Stadtler et al, 2013; also see Ecker et al, 2011).…”

Attentional disengagement from emotional information predicts future depression via changes in ruminative brooding: A five-month longitudinal eye-tracking study

“…Studies using the dot-probe task have demonstrated an association between the use of habitual rumination (Donaldson, Lam, & Mathews, 2007) and particularly brooding (Joormann et al, 2006;Southworth, Grafton, MacLeod, & Watkins, 2017) with larger attention biases for negative words at 1,000-ms stimuli presentations. Similarly, eye-tracking studies using free-viewing paradigms have shown that habitual brooders are characterized by both more sustained attention to sad faces and less sustained attention to happy faces (Duque, Sanchez, & Vazquez, 2014;Owens & Gibb, 2017), a double bias that is commonly observed in depressed individuals (see Armstrong & Olatunji, 2012). Such associations in these studies were independent of concurrent levels of depression, suggesting that they may reflect factors of vulnerability rather than consequences of current depression states.…”

Modification of Attentional Bias to Emotional Faces Following Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy in People with a Current Depression

“…Similar to Owens and Gibb (2017) and Krejtz et al (2018), we measured attentional bias by calculating gaze duration for specific facial expressions controlling for total gaze duration for all facial expressions. We used the relative score not an absolute gaze duration because it is a more direct measure of an attentional bias reflecting the difference between processing of happy, sad, angry, and neutral faces, and it is currently the standard procedure in studying attentional biases.…”

“…We used the relative score not an absolute gaze duration because it is a more direct measure of an attentional bias reflecting the difference between processing of happy, sad, angry, and neutral faces, and it is currently the standard procedure in studying attentional biases. We calculated relative scores for each of the facial expressions using a standard formula (e.g., Everaert et al 2014;Owens and Gibb 2017). The total gaze duration for each type of face (target face in the formula below) was divided by the total viewing time for all facial expressions.…”

“…For example, eye tracking studies have consistently found that depression is associated with prolonged maintenance of gaze on negative information (Caseras et al 2007;Eizenman et al 2003;Kellough et al 2009), and greater neglect of positive information (e.g., De Raedt and Koster 2010, see Peckham et al 2010). Prolonged processing of negative information leads to more persistent sad mood (e.g., Disner et al 2017) and has been found to be related to greater trait rumination (Donaldson et al 2007;Owens and Gibb 2017) and increased daily rumination in depressed individuals (Holas et al 2019).…”