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Coping with stress : the contribution of cognitive biases to rumination

University of British Columbia

Rumination is a pattern of passive and repetitive thoughts about symptoms of one’s distress, as well as its causes and consequences. While rumination has been linked to onset and exacerbation of depression, recent research suggests that only one subtype of rumination, brooding, and not the other type, reflection, is responsible for these effects. Theoretical perspectives and empirical evidence suggest that biases in inhibition, shifting, and updating information in working memory underlie rumination. However, to date, we do not know which cognitive bias contributes the most to rumination, and more specifically, to brooding and reflection. In this study, I aimed to address this gap in the literature using an experience sampling methodology. To this end, I invited 267 undergraduate students to the lab for a baseline session. During this session, they rated their level of depression, their tendency to ruminate, and their affect. They also completed three cognitive tasks, Emotional Stroop Task, Affective Switching Task, and Emotional 2-Back task, that assessed their inhibition, shifting and updating biases, respectively. Next, participants rated their level of brooding, reflection, and negative affect at nine different time points within 48 hours of their most stressful midterm exam. I hypothesized that updating bias would be the main cognitive control bias to predict the level and trajectory of brooding after the exam. I further hypothesized that the level of brooding, and not reflection, at each time point would predict the intensity of negative affect at the following time point. I also conducted additional exploratory analyses to examine (1) the association of inhibition, shifting, and updating biases with reflection; and (2) the bidirectional association between rumination and negative affect. Contrary to my hypothesis, inhibition and shifting biases predicted brooding after the exam. Inhibition also played a role in reflection. Furthermore, brooding, and not reflection, predicted negative affect at the next time point. In addition, negative affect predicted both brooding and reflection at the next time point. The role of cognitive control biases in brooding and reflection, and its implications, are discussed.

Text

2020-08-19

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International

http://hdl.handle.net/2429/75604

Psychology

University of British Columbia

UBCV

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/