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"Cambridge Dictionary, Rumination Merriam-Webster: "to go over in the mind repeatedly and often casually or slowly"Merriam-Webster, Rumination
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.
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 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.
Theories There are various models of rumination which focus on different aspects: negative emotions and/or the circumstances surrounding that emotion: Responsive Styles Theory, rumination on sadness model, five-factor model, negative cognitive style model, social phobia model; discrepancies between one's current and desired status: goal progress theory, conceptual evaluative model of rumination; the negative themes of uncontrollability and harm in metacognitions.
Response styles theory Response styles theory (RST) initially defined rumination as passively and repetitively focusing on one's symptoms of depression and the possible causes and consequences of these symptoms. As evidence for this definition, rumination has been implicated in the development, maintenance, and aggravation of both depressive symptoms, as well as episodes of major depression. Recently, RST has expanded the definition of rumination beyond depression to include passive and repetitive focus on the causes, consequences, and symptoms of one's distress in general. This change was made because rumination has been implicated in a host of disorders, not just depression.
RST also contends that positive distraction is the healthy alternative to rumination, where focus is directed to positive stimuli instead of to distress. However, the literature suggests that positive distraction may not be as potent a tool as once thought.
Specifically, the S-REF model defines rumination as "repetitive thoughts generated by attempts to cope with self-discrepancy that are directed primarily toward processing the content of self-referent information and not toward immediate goal-directed action." Put more simply, when a person ruminates, they aim to answer questions such as: How do I feel about this event? How can I change my thoughts and feelings about the event? How can I prevent disturbing thoughts and feelings in the future? However, in answering these questions, ruminators tend to focus on their emotions (i.e., "self-referent information") as opposed to problem solving (i.e., "goal-directed action").
Meta-cognition is also an important part of the S-REF model and helps to explain the link between rumination and depression. Specifically, those who hold "positive meta-cognitive beliefs" about rumination (to make sense of negative thoughts and emotions or ensure the prevention of the same) are perhaps initially motivated to engage in rumination with high perseverance. However, individuals who have engaged themselves in positive acts of rumination were more likely to use rumination as a coping mechanism upon encountering negative emotions. This causes the individual to modify their perception of rumination as unpleasant, unmanageable and "socially damaging" in general. Rumination additionally has a tendency to magnify with an up-regulation of emotions in the body, thus beginning the downward-moving spiral of depression. The individual's "negative meta-cognitive" beliefs then contribute to the development and maintenance of depression.
Goal progress theory Goal progress theory (GPT), sometimes referred to as Control Theory, seeks to explain rumination as a function of goal progress. Specifically, GPT views rumination as an example of the Zeigarnik Effect, which suggests that individuals are more likely to remember information from unfinished tasks than from finished tasks. From this understanding, GPT defines rumination as "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.
GPT predicts that individuals for whom goal-related information is highly accessible should be more likely to ruminate. Various studies have provided support for this prediction. However, the rumination experienced is focused more towards problem solving than rumination described by RST.
Measurement There are multiple tools for measuring rumination. These include the following:
The tendency to ruminate can be assessed with the Ruminative Responses Scale of the Response Styles Questionnaire. On this measure, people are asked to indicate how often they engage in 22 ruminative thoughts or behaviors when they feel sad or blue.