Rumination is the sustained focus on and repetition of negative thoughts and emotions. There are various psychological models of rumination, which focus on different aspects: negative emotions and/or the circumstances surrounding that emotion; discrepancies between one's current and desired status; and the negative themes of uncontrollability and harm in metacognitions. Rumination is a mechanism that develops and sustains psychopathological conditions such as anxiety, depression, and other mental states. Multiple tools exist to measure ruminative thoughts. Treatments specifically addressing ruminative thought patterns are still in the early stages of development. However, recent meta analyses of randomized-controlled trials suggest that psychological interventions including mindfulness and mindfulness-based interventions can significantly reduce rumination.
Definition Popularly defined, rumination is "an endless repetition of a negative thought or theme that spirals downward", or an "endless loop of reрetitive thoughts аnd worries". Dictionary definitions of rumination include:
Cambridge Dictionary: "the act of thinking carefully and for a long period about something" Merriam-Webster: "to go over in the mind repeatedly and often casually or slowly" Scholarly definitions include:
Response Styles Theory: a form of coping with self-discrepancy in which one focuses on self-referent thoughts and emotions instead of goal-directed action. Goal Progress Theory: "the tendency to think recurrently about important, higher order goals that have not yet been attained" or towards which sufficient progress has not been made.
Occurrence
Variations Some common thoughts that are characteristic of ruminative responses are questioning the well-being of oneself and focusing on the possible causes and consequences of one's depressive symptoms. For example, some ruminative thoughts include "why am I such a loser", "I'm in such a bad mood" or "I just don't feel like doing anything". Several variations of rumination can be distinguished in various types or forms:
State rumination: 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: task-oriented thought processes focused on goal-achievement and correction of mistakes. Task-irrelevant rumination: utilizing events or people unassociated with the blocked goal to distract a person from the failure. Post-event processing: 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: 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.
Sex differences According to Susan Nolen-Hoeksema, women tend to ruminate when they are depressed, whereas men tend to distract themselves. This difference in response style was proposed to explain the higher rates of depression in women compared to men. Research has supported the theory that women have a greater likelihood to ruminate than men, but the magnitude of this difference seems to be small. The prediction that men are more likely to distract themselves has not been consistently supported in research. A meta-analysis was performed on both the sex differences in rumination of adults and the rumination subtypes "brooding" and "reflection." Studies show that women's chances of experiencing depressive symptoms or depression was twice that of men. The response styles theory (RST) suggests this may be due, to some extent, to higher rates of rumination in women. Brooding can be operationalized as continuous, passive, negative internalized thoughts. It is highly connected to worsening depression. Reflection is neutral, rather than negative, more active observation of self. In the meta-analysis, women showed statistically significant increases in levels of both brooding and reflection, supporting RST. Interestingly, there was a much smaller sex difference in reflection than brooding. The meta-analyses found similar results across multiple study designs.
Healthy self-disclosure Although rumination is generally unhealthy and associated with depression, thinking and talking about one's feelings can be beneficial under the right conditions. According to Pennebaker, healthy self-disclosure can reduce distress and rumination when it leads to greater insight and understanding about the source of one's problems. Thus, when people share their feelings with others in the context of supportive relationships, they are likely to experience growth. In contrast, when people repetitively ruminate and dwell on the same problem without making progress, they are likely to experience depression. Co-rumination is a process defined as "excessively discussing personal problems within a dyadic relationship", a construct that is relatively understudied in both its negative and positive trade-offs.
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