Training Positive Rumination in Expressive Writing to Enhance Psychological Adjustment and Working Memory Updating for Maladaptive Ruminators.

Hongfei Yang,Huizhong Li

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2020.00789

Abstract

Rumination is associated with psychological adjustment and working memory (WM) capacity. Studies have shown that psychological interventions can reduce negative rumination and improve psychological adjustment and WM capacity. The present study investigated the effect of positive rumination training in expressive writing on psychological adjustment and WM updating capacity. Within an experimental design, positive rumination was manipulated for 10 participants who were maladaptive ruminators in an experiment using a 5-week training compared to the control group with nine participants. Results revealed significant enhancement of psychological adjustment and the response time (RT) of WM updating in the experimental group but not in the control group. The two groups did not show significant difference of all the variables in pretest. However, the experimental group showed significantly better outcomes than the control group in posttest. The results suggest that positive rumination training in expressive writing is effective and rumination has a causal influence on WM updating capacity.

Highlights

Positive and Negative RuminationRumination was originally defined as repetitive and passive thinking about negative affects and their possible causes and consequences (Nolen-Hoeksema, 1991)
This is consistent with previous findings that show that deliberate rumination (Shigemoto et al, 2017) and problem-solving (Gortner et al, 2006) are productive ways
The present study found that positive rumination training in expressive writing improved the working memory (WM) updating capacity in terms of response time (RT) to all three types of words significantly, indicating that rumination has a causal influence on WM updating

Summary

Introduction

Rumination was originally defined as repetitive and passive thinking about negative affects and their possible causes and consequences (Nolen-Hoeksema, 1991). It is perceived as a risk factor for psychopathology, especially for depression (Papageorgiou and Siegle, 2003). The majority of previous studies on rumination focused on its pathological aspects. In these studies, individuals with high and low levels of negative rumination were usually identified as ruminators and non-ruminators, respectively (e.g., Davis and Nolen-Hoeksema, 2000; Beckwé and Deroost, 2016). Martin and Tesser (1996) proposed that positive forms of rumination help individuals find

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Conclusion