Does repetitive negative thinking affect attention? Differential effects of worry and rumination on attention to emotional stimuli.

Abstract

Worry and rumination, two cardinal responses to emotional events, are key for maintaining negative emotion and have been implicated in the etiology and maintenance of anxiety and depressive disorders. Though worry and rumination are highly correlated with one another and people who engage in one often engage in both, they may differentially affect emotion. Specifically, previous work suggests that worry helps people avoid (intense) emotion, while rumination provokes it. Examining the ways in which these two forms of repetitive negative thinking (RNT) influence cognitive processing of emotional material may help us better understand the emotional sequelae of worry and rumination. This study examines visual attention to emotional information, since attending to certain types of information opens the door for further processing of it. The current study induced worry and rumination and then used eye tracking to compare how each form of RNT influenced the allocation of attention to emotional scenes. Participants induced to worry, compared with those induced to ruminate, spent less time viewing positive (vs. neutral) scenes and were the only group to preferentially maintain their attention on negative images when they were paired with positive images. These findings suggest that worry, compared with rumination, leads to the relative avoidance of positive information. Implications of these findings for research on mood and anxiety disorders are discussed.

Visual attention toward emotional stimuli: Anxiety symptoms correspond to distinct gaze patterns

“…Additionally, it is not clear if the ER task we used is the best way to measure visual attention towards emotional stimuli. In fact, despite the advantage in ecological validity to use dynamic faces over static ones, some recent studies have used negative and positive images to measure visual attention in clinical cohorts, including the recent Lewis et al [10] study that influenced our study hypotheses. Moreover, despite their potential advantage in ecological validity, traditional ER tasks are riddled with measurement constraints such as ceiling effects for happiness and response bias [39][40][41].…”

“…In general, individuals with anxiety disorders show increased vigilance to threat during free viewing and visual search and difficulty disengaging from threat during visual search but not during free viewing tasks relative to controls [ 1 ]. Recent work has examined the relations between worry, rumination, and visual attention, and found that self-reported rumination is linked to greater attention to sad stimuli [ 8 , 9 ] but worry, compared with rumination, leads to relative avoidance of positive information [ 10 ]. Whether this is true across anxiety disorders, representing a transdiagnostic process, remains to be tested.…”

“…Last, we wanted to explore if there was reduced fixation on positive faces in high levels of worry and anxiety. Based on the finding that worry, compared to rumination, leads to relative avoidance of positive information ([ 10 ] we expected that higher anxiety severity would predict reduced fixation on happy faces.…”

Dissociable Associations of Facets of Mindfulness with Worry, Rumination, and Transdiagnostic Perseverative Thought

“…Nonreactivity, on the other hand, is the ability to tolerate potentially distressing thoughts and emotions without feeling compelled to react to them (e.g., by trying to avoid or change them). According to several prominent theoretical models of worry, worry functions primarily as a (generally maladaptive) strategy for controlling or changing one's emotional experiences; for example, to avoid distressing mental imagery (Borkovec, Alcaine, & Behar, 2004), positive emotional stimuli (Lewis et al, 2019), or a negative emotional contrast (Newman & Llera, 2011). If these models are correct, they would most likely predict a specific inverse relationship between worry severity and nonreactivity.…”

Rumination Derails Reinforcement Learning with Possible Implications for Ineffective Behavior

“…At study visit, participants received an adaptation of a well-studied induction procedure (e.g., Lewis, Blanco, Raila, & Joormann, 2019;Nolen-Hoeksema & Morrow, 1993). This entailed exposing participants to cues designed to induce either a ruminative (RUM) or a neutral (NEU) state.…”