Abstract
This study demonstrates that rumination is reflected in two behavioural signals that both play an important role in face-to-face interactions and provides evidence for the negative impact of rumination on social cognition. Sixty-one students were randomly assigned either to a condition in which rumination was induced or to a control condition. Their task was to play a speech-based word association game with an Embodied Conversational Agent during which their word associations, pitch imitation and eye movements were measured. Two questionnaires assessed their ruminative tendencies and mind wandering thoughts, respectively. Rumination predicted differences in task-related mind wandering, polarity of lexical associations, pitch imitation, and blinks while mind wandering predicted differences in saccades. This outcome may show that rumination has a negative impact on certain aspects of social interactions.
Highlights
We all experience our thoughts drifting away while attempting to concentrate on a task, whether it be reading an article, listening to a lecture, writing a paper, or even having a conversation
The guiding question in this research is: To what extent does self-focused rumination affect mind wandering (MW), negative lexical associations, pitch imitation and eye behaviour? We propose the following hypotheses: H1) Rumination will result in increases in MW; H2) Rumination will increase the occurrence of negative lexical associations; H3) Rumination will negatively affect imitation, and ; H4) Rumination will affect eye movement behaviours; it will be associated with more blinks, less saccades, less fixations, and longer average fixation duration
We first performed a Kolmogorov-Smirnov test of normality for rumination measured at the beginning and end of the experiment, MW(TRI/TUT), high and low pitch, each eye movement parameter, and lexical associations in order to evaluate the distribution of values in comparison to the standard normal distribution
Summary
We all experience our thoughts drifting away while attempting to concentrate on a task, whether it be reading an article, listening to a lecture, writing a paper, or even having a conversation. The past decade has seen a substantial increase in the understanding of how MW thoughts emerge and the reasons for their occurrence
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