State Rumination: Associations with Emotional Stress Reactivity and Attention Biases

Abstract

Within dysphoria, rumination has been identified as a particularly maladaptive emotion regulation strategy linked to prolonged negative affect and the onset of depressive episodes. Until now, the majority of research assessing naturally occurring rumination has utilized trait rumination measures; however, additional information may be obtained by assessing state rumination. The current study examined the association between state rumination and participants’ emotional recovery from stress. In addition, biased attention toward emotional information was investigated as a mechanism that might underlie state rumination. Participants completed the exogenous cuing task to assess attentional engagement and disengagement from emotional facial expressions followed by a psychosocial stressor. State rumination and self-reported sadness were measured during the recovery period. As expected, state rumination was associated with less recovery in sadness scores, even after controlling for trait rumination and depressive symptoms. Moreover, within the high dysphoria group, participants who had more difficulty disengaging from emotional expressions reported higher levels of rumination in response to the stressor. Results highlight an important association between state rumination and individuals’ recovery from stress, and suggest that difficulty disengaging attention from emotional expressions might be one mechanism underlying state rumination in dysphoria.

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

“…These findings are consistent with findings from other recent studies demonstrating cognitive control difficulties for positive and negative emotional information among ruminators (e.g., Joormann & Tran, 2009; see Whitmer & Gotlib, 2012, for a review). For example, our findings are consistent with a study that found poststressor rumination was associated with difficulty disengaging from sad, angry, and happy faces among dysphoric individuals on an exogenous cuing task (LeMoult, Arditte, D’Avanzato, & Joormann, 2013). The present findings are also consistent with another dot-probe study with youth that found greater attention to emotional faces associated with rumination among maltreated children following a sad mood induction (Romens & Pollak, 2012).…”

The Brief State Rumination Inventory (BSRI): Validation and Psychometric Evaluation

“…In keeping with this, meaningful differences between trait and state rumination have been reported. For instance, state rumination predicts subsequent negative affect, poor recovery from sad mood, and emotional reactivity to a social stressor, independently of trait rumination (Hilt, Aldao, & Fischer, 2015;LeMoult, Arditte, D'Avanzato, & Joormann, 2013;Moberly & Watkins, 2008). Taken together, these findings suggest that state rumination is a highly informative phenomenon for mental functioning, whose very features are not fully captured by trait rumination.…”

“…However, a psychometrically sound measure that allows to assess fluctuations in state rumination has been lacking. Existing measures have so far focused on specific and narrow forms of state rumination or do not provide enough psychometric information to be deemed reliable, robust, and valid (e.g., LeMoult et al, 2013;Roberts et al, 2013).…”

“…A variety of measures address specific forms of state rumination, such as following an interpersonal offense (McCullough, Bono, & Root, 2007) or an intelligence test (LeMoult et al, 2013), with their limited scope making them unsuitable as a measure of state rumination in other contexts. Some measures have adopted a time reference incompatible with a state assessment (e.g., a span of an hour or a day; Ciesla, Reilly, Dickson, Emanuel, & Updegraff, 2012;Hilt et.…”

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

“…Therefore, research has turned to the investigation of rumination more proximal to its occurrence using online reports (e.g., in diary studies, experience sampling studies). A great advantage of this shift in research paradigms is that rumination can be linked more directly to the occurrence of negative or stressful events (e.g., Genet & Siemer, 2012;LeMoult, 2013; see also Smith & Alloy, 2009). This way, rumination can be assessed as a more transient construct, namely a phenomenon that occurs within individuals, across time, and in relation to other time-varying phenomena (e.g., affect, stress).…”