Ruminative self-focus, negative life events, and negative affect.

Moberly NJ, Watkins ER.

Mood Disorders Centre, School of Psychology, University of Exeter, Exeter EX4 4QG, UK. n.j.moberly@ex.ac.uk

Ruminative thinking is believed to exacerbate the psychological distress that follows stressful life events. An experience-sampling study was conducted in which participants recorded negative life events, ruminative self-focus, and negative affect eight times daily over one week. Occasions when participants reported a negative event were marked by higher levels of negative affect. Additionally, negative events were prospectively associated with higher levels of negative affect at the next sampling occasion, and this relationship was partially mediated by momentary ruminative self-focus. Depressive symptoms were associated with more frequent negative events, but not with increased reactivity to negative events. Trait rumination was associated with reports of more severe negative events and increased reactivity to negative events. These results suggest that the extent to which a person engages in ruminative self-focus after everyday stressors is an important determinant of the degree of distress experienced after such events. Further, dispositional measures of rumination predict mood reactivity to everyday stressors in a non-clinical sample.

Cognitive defusion and self-relevant negative thoughts:

examining the impact of a ninety year old technique

Masuda A, Hayes SC, Twohig MP, Drossel C, Lillis J, Washio Y.

Georgia State University, Atlanta, GA, USA.

A previous time-series study showed that rapidly repeating a single-word version of a negative self-referential thought reduced the discomfort and the believability associated with that thought. The present parametric study examined whether durations of word repetition were differentially effective in altering the discomfort and believability of negative self-referential thought. In two studies, both discomfort and believability varied systematically with the duration of word repetition. The effects of rapid repetition on emotional discomfort bottomed out after 3 s to 10 s of rapid repetition, whereas the effects on believability did so after 20 s to 30 s of repetition. This study lends support to the cognitive defusion interpretation of the effect of word repetition, suggesting that emotional discomfort and believability may be distinctive functional aspects of cognitive events.

Full Article: http://www.pegahuman.no/masuda.pdf

Some psychological effects associated with positive and negative thinking about stressful event outcomes: Was Pollyanna right?

Goodhart DE.

This study investigated psychological effects associated with tendencies to focus one's thinking on positive versus negative outcomes of concluded stressful events, called respectively, positive and negative thinking. Four questions were addressed: (a) whether positive and negative thinking benefit or reduce psychological well-being, (b) whether these effects are transitory or enduring, (c) whether they are limited to thoughts about an event's impact on oneself or generalize to thoughts about an event's external consequences, and (d) whether tendencies to think positively or negatively about prior stressors influence psychological vulnerability to the impact of future ones. College students completed an event-outcome appraisal questionnaire designed to make salient positive and negative thoughts about the outcomes of recent stressful events. Subjects' well-being was then assessed both immediately after the salience manipulation and again 8 weeks later. Positive thinking increased the well-being that subjects reported immediately after their thoughts were assessed, but was unrelated to the well-being they reported after an 8-week delay. This suggests that although thinking positively about past event outcomes may temporarily lead to perceptions of increased well-being while the thoughts are salient, it has no enduring influence. In contrast, negative thinking was associated with lower reported well-being not only when the thoughts were salient but after a delay as well. Psychological effects associated with both types of thinking were due mostly to self-relevant thoughts rather than to externally relevant ones. Negative thinking about prior stressor outcomes appeared to increase vulnerability to the impact of later ones on several aspects of well-being. Overall, results for negative thinking are consistent with evidence reported after an 8-week delay. This suggests that although thinking positively effects that persist over time. However, positive thinking does not seem to have beneficial effects that continue once these thoughts are no longer salient.

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