Can’t Take My Eyes Off of You: Eye Tracking Reveals How Ruminating Young Adolescents Get Stuck

Abstract

Rumination, a cognitive process that involves passively, repetitively focusing on negative feelings and their meaning, is a transdiagnostic risk factor for psychopathology. Research with adults has suggested that attentional control difficulties may underlie rumination, but questions remain about the nature of these processes. Furthermore, the relationship between attentional control and rumination in youth has received little empirical examination. In the present study, 92 youth (ages 9–14; 72% girls; 74% Caucasian) reported on their trait rumination and internalizing symptoms. They also completed a 1,500 ms emotional-faces dot-probe task while their eye movements were measured to examine overt visual attention with high temporal precision. Youth’s rumination was associated with greater dwell on emotional faces but not with initial orientation. These findings suggest that rumination is associated with increased attention to emotional information during the later stages of selective attention rather than earlier orienting to emotional cues. Implications for prevention and treatment of psychopathology are discussed.

Rumination in Early Adolescent Girls: An EEG Study of Cognitive Control and Emotional Responding in an Emotional Go/NoGo Task

“…Relatively few studies have examined rumination in relation to cognitive control processes or negative emotional biases in youth. In line with evidence from adults, behavioral studies in late childhood and adolescence have found that high trait rumination is associated with difficulty inhibiting responses to negatively valenced stimuli, particularly when switching from negative to positive blocks in an emotional Go/NoGo task (Hilt, Leitzke, & Pollak, 2014) and with longer gaze-time to negative faces in an emotional dot-probe task (Hilt, Leitzke, & Pollak, 2017). Further, Wagner, Alloy, and Abramson (2015) found that, in adolescent boys with elevated depressive symptoms, rumination predicted worse sustained attention on a counting task.…”

Stress Reactivity as a Pathway from Attentional Control Deficits in Everyday Life to Depressive Symptoms in Adolescent Girls

“…Moreover, difficulties disengaging attention from negative stimuli are associated with heightened emotional reactivity in response to negative mood and stress induction in adults (Compton, Heller, Banich, Palmieri, & Miller, 2000; Sanchez et al, 2013), whereas stronger switching abilities are associated with more effective emotion regulation (i.e., downregulation of negative affect) in response to a negative mood induction (Malooly, Genet, & Siemer, 2013). In two recent studies of youth, difficulty inhibiting negative emotional information on a switching task (Hilt, Leitzke, & Pollak, 2014) and difficulty disengaging attention from emotional stimuli (Hilt, Leitzke, & Pollak, in press) were associated with trait depressive rumination. Providing more direct support for the idea that strong attentional control may diminish stress reactivity, cognitive bias training studies reveal that teaching individuals to disengage their attention from negative stimuli and to increase cognitive control reduces rumination (Siegle et al, 2014; Siegle et al, 2007) and reactivity to stressful events (for a review, see Joormann & Vanderlind, 2014).…”

Stationary and ambulatory attention patterns are differentially associated with early temperamental risk for socioemotional problems: Preliminary evidence from a multimodal eye-tracking investigation

“…Only a handful of studies have utilized eye-tracking measures with dot-probe paradigms to examine AB in youth (Burris, Barry-Anwar, & Rivera, 2017; Burris, Barry-Anwar, Sims, et al, 2017; Hilt, Leitzke, & Pollak, 2017; Price et al, 2013, 2016; Tsypes, Owens, & Gibb, 2017). These studies commonly measured (a) initial attention vigilance to emotional faces (e.g., angry face; e.g., Price et al, 2016; Tsypes et al, 2017); and (b) sustained attention preference toward the emotional faces (e.g., Hilt et al, 2017). These indices showed improved internal consistency and reliability compared to RT measures in 9- to 13-year-olds (Price et al, 2015).…”

“…These indices showed improved internal consistency and reliability compared to RT measures in 9- to 13-year-olds (Price et al, 2015). Findings from three studies that compared dot-probe eye-tracking and RT indices showed that while eye-tracking measures were associated with levels of rumination (Hilt et al, 2017), suicidal ideation (Tsypes et al, 2017), and transition from anxiety to later depression (Price et al, 2016). Eye-tracking findings were evident even when there were no symptom-related differences in RT scores.…”