The Relationship between Rumination, Dysphoria, and Self-Referent Thinking: Some Preliminary Findings

Abstract

Rumination has recently been conceptualized as “behaviors and thoughts that focus one's attention on one's depressive symptoms and on the implication of these symptoms” [1, p. 569). In this article, we describe current theoretical formulations about how a ruminative processing style interacts with a dysphoric mood to yield high levels of self-relevant thinking. In the subsequent sections, we describe three experiments, the results of which broadly support a combination of two themes described in the literature: (i) that rumination, in the absence of dysphoria, seems to be associated with high levels of task focus, consistent with the attentional inflexibility hypothesis; and (ii) that we can distinguish between the effects of rumination and dysphoria in terms of their contributions to the content of a self-referential thinking. In particular, dysphoria seems to be associated with higher levels of pre-occupation with one's concerns while rumination, particularly in the presence of a dysphoric mood, seems to be associated with a pre-occupation with one's own performance: a finding consistent with the mood as input hypothesis for rumination. The theoretical implications for these findings are discussed, and we outline two important issues for future research to tackle.