negative form of rumination no relation anxiety
Pathology
Extensive research on the effects of rumination, or the tendency to self-reflect, shows that the negative form of rumination (associated with dysphoria) interferes with people's ability to focus on problem-solving and results in dwelling on negative thoughts about past failures. Evidence from studies suggests that the negative implications of rumination are due to cognitive biases, such as memory and attentional biases, which predispose ruminators to selectively devote attention to negative stimuli.The organic causes of rumination are not fully understood. Research has identified the activation of certain regions in the brain's default mode networks as neural substrates of rumination, but the number of brain-imaging studies on rumination is limited.The tendency to negatively ruminate is a stable constant over time and serves as a significant risk factor for clinical depression. Not only are habitual ruminators more likely to become depressed, but experimental studies have demonstrated that people who are induced to ruminate experience greater depressed mood. There is also evidence that rumination is linked to general anxiety, post traumatic stress, binge drinking, eating disorders, and self-injurious behavior. Research suggests that rumination is somewhat associated with a higher frequency of non-suicidal self-injury, and more heavily associated with a history of non-suicidal self injury.Rumination was originally believed to predict the duration of depressive symptoms. In other words, ruminating about problems was presumed to be a form of memory rehearsal which was believed to actually lengthen the experience of depression. The evidence now suggests that although rumination contributes to depression, it is not necessarily correlated with the duration of symptoms.Research on the relationships between executive functions and rumination has yielded mixed results. Some studies have observed a negative correlation with two executive functioning abilities, set-shifting and inhibition, but the magnitudes of those relationships are unclear. Another study observed only one relationship between rumination and one executive function, specifically the ability to discard past information from working memory. Other studies, however, found no relationship between rumination and working memory.State rumination, which involves dwelling on the consequences and feelings associated with the failure. State rumination is more common in people who are pessimistic, neurotic, and who have negative attributional styles.
Action rumination, which consists of task-oriented thought processes focused on goal-achievement and correction of mistakes.
Task-irrelevant rumination, which utilizes events or people unassociated with the blocked goal to distract a person from the failure.
Post-event processing is pervasive detailed reviewing of socially failed or embarrassing activities or situations that subjects perceive even more negatively/anxiety-provoking than they were, and they reinforce with pervasive recollections of similarly biased memories.
Stress-reactive rumination is a pervasive detailed reviewing of painful experiences that specific stressful events induced and a cognitive bias enhances by memorising these events generally more stressful that they were while triggering depression.Repetitive thought/thinking questionnaire
The 31-item Repetitive Thinking Questionnaire (RTQ) measures worry, rumination, and post-event processing with the purpose of controlling for effects associated with a psychological diagnosis or disorder. It includes two subscales, Repetitive Negative Thinking (RNT) and Absence of Repetitive Thinking (ART). RNT is associated with anxiety, depression, and other negative emotions as it influences metacognitive beliefs, cognitive avoidance strategies, and maladaptive thought control strategies. The ART subscale reflects the absence of those negative emotions associated with the RNT subscale, essentially measuring their opposites.Worry
Rumination appears closely related to worry. Some models consider rumination to be a type of worry (S-REF). Worry has been identified as "a chain of thoughts and images, negatively affect-laden and relatively uncontrollable; it represents an attempt to engage in mental problem solving on an issue whose outcome is uncertain, but contains the possibility of one or more negative outcomes."Worry is often studied in the context of generalized anxiety disorder (GAD), whereas rumination is often studied in the context of major depressive disorder. Because of the high comorbidity of these two conditions, more recent research is exploring the overlap of worry and rumination.According to the Mental Health Foundation, rumination has been identified to be one of the main problems that leads to anxiety and depression. A study conducted by psychologists from the University of Liverpool, suggests that dwelling on negative events that have occurred in one's life is the biggest predictor of depression and anxiety.Measures of rumination and worry have also demonstrated high correlations, above and beyond that of symptom measures of anxiety and depression (r=.66; Beck & Perkins, 2001). Rumination and worry overlap in their relationships to anxiety and depression, although some studies do indicate specificity of rumination to depression and worry to anxiety. Rumination has been found to predict changes in both depression and anxiety symptoms and individuals with major depression have been reported to engage in levels of worry similar to individuals with GAD. As a whole, these studies suggest that rumination and worry are related not only to each other, but also each is related to symptoms of both depression and anxiety.
Other studies have demonstrated that the content of worry and rumination are distinct; worry thoughts are often focused on problem-solving and have a future orientation, whereas ruminative thoughts concern themes of loss and are more focused on the past. Rumination, as compared to worry, has also been associated with less effort and less confidence in problem solving (Papageorgiou & Wells, 2004). It has also been suggested that rumination and worry serve different purposes, namely that rumination is associated with greater belief in the personal relevance of a situation and a larger need to understand it, whereas worry is associated with a desire to avoid worry thoughts (Watkins 2004b). Worry has also been hypothesized to contain more imagery than rumination; however, support for this has been mixed.Overall, these studies suggest that worry and rumination are related constructs that both lead to depression and anxiety. It is likely that rumination and worry, as with rumination and reflection, are related types of repetitive negative thinking that may be better captured as subtypes of some larger construct, such as avoidant coping strategies.
no relation