Don’t start what you can’t stop: Differentiating individual differences in ruminative onset and ruminative persistence, and their contributions to dysphoria.

Abstract

There is much evidence to suggest that rumination and dysphoria share a close relationship. The tendency to ruminate is considered a stable individual difference, reflecting variation in repetitive thoughts concerning the causes and consequences of distress. In the present study, we evaluated the veracity of a proposed distinction between 2 hypothetical dimensions of ruminative tendency, which plausibly represent dissociable facets of dispositional rumination, and whose interactive influence may make a particularly strong contribution to dysphoria. These dimensions are ruminative onset, the probability of experiencing ruminative symptoms when feeling upset, and ruminative persistence, the continuation of ruminative symptoms once initiated. The findings indicate that ruminative onset and ruminative persistence do indeed represent dissociable dimensions of ruminative disposition. Furthermore, as hypothesized, it is the interaction between these 2 facets of rumination that makes the greatest contribution to the prediction of variance in dysphoria.