Abstract
The association between brooding and reflection, components of rumination, and attentional control, was examined using a novel executive attention task. Participants (n=156) self-encoded words from two semantic categories by providing autobiographical memories involving the words. They subsequently classified the self-encoded and non-self encoded (new) words into the two semantic categories. The degree to which stimuli self-encoding interfered with semantic classification was used as a measure of attentional control impairment. Whereas brooding was positively associated with attentional impairment, reflection was negatively associated with such impairment. These associations were not attributable to current depression levels or to differences in the nature (valence and meaningfulness) of the autobiographical memories generated by participants. These findings emphasise the importance of self-referential processing biases in rumination.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 876-885 |
| Number of pages | 10 |
| Journal | Cognition and Emotion |
| Volume | 24 |
| Issue number | 5 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - 2010 |
Bibliographical note
Funding Information:Correspondence should be addressed to: Nilly Mor, School of Education, Hebrew University, Mount Scopus, Jerusalem, Israel 91905. E-mail: [email protected] This research was supported by a grant from the Binational Science Foundation (BSF 2003·308·02) to NM and JW. This research was conducted as the MA thesis of the first author supervised by Nilly Mor and Eva Gilboa-Schechtman.
Keywords
- Bias
- Brooding
- Executive attention
- Rumination
- Self