Rumination and Self-Reflection

This descriptive article explores the uses of poetry and journaling exercises as means of helping students develop their self-reflective capacities within the context of international social work. First, self-reflection and its importance to social work practice and education is discussed. Second, the importance of self-reflection in international and cross-cultural work is highlighted. Third, the application of poetry and other journal writing exercises as a means of facilitating self-reflection is explored. Poems written in response to structured exercises by students who took part in an international experience in social work education in Leon, Nicaragua, are presented as examples. The exercises presented can be used by educators in various helping professions who seek to help their students expand their self-reflective skills and engage in cross-cultural and international practice.

As smartphones have become more prevalent in society, so have consequences. Using research from Carr (2010) and Turkle (2015), this study investigated the relationship between smartphones and reflection, mindfulness and hyperactivity. The results showed that smartphone addiction symptoms of withdrawal are significantly related to hyperactivity and negatively related to reflection. Phubbing, which is snubbing others with a smartphone, is negatively related to levels of mindfulness. Social media addiction was not a significant predictor.

Laypeople and many social scientists assume that superior reasoning abilities lead to greater well-being. However, previous research has been inconclusive. This may be because prior investigators used operationalizations of reasoning that favored analytic as opposed to wise thinking. We assessed wisdom in terms of the degree to which people use various pragmatic schemas to deal with social conflicts. With a random sample of Americans we found that wise reasoning is associated with greater life satisfaction, less negative affect, better social relationships, less depressive rumination, more positive vs. negative words used in speech, and greater longevity. The relationship between wise reasoning and well-being held even when controlling for socio-economic factors, verbal abilities, and several personality traits. As in prior work there was no association between intelligence and well-being. Further, wise reasoning mediated age-related differences in well-being, particularly among the middle-aged and older adults. Implications for research on reasoning, well-being and aging are discussed.

Although recent findings indicate that people can reflect either adaptively or maladaptively over negative experiences, extant research has not examined how culture influences this process. We compared the self-reflective practices of Russians (members of an interdependent culture characterized by a tendency to brood) and Americans (members of an independent culture in which self-reflection has been studied extensively). We predicted that self-reflection would be associated with less-detrimental outcomes among Russians because they self-distance more when analyzing their feelings than Americans do. Findings from two studies supported these predictions. In Study 1, self-reflection was associated with fewer depressive symptoms among Russians than among Americans. In Study 2, Russians displayed less distress and a more adaptive pattern of construals than Americans after reflecting over a recent negative event. In addition, they self-distanced more than Americans while analyzing their feelings, and self-distancing mediated the cultural differences in self-reflection. These findings demonstrate how culture shapes the way people reflect over negative experiences.

Workers regularly report high levels of stress and burnout because of their daily interactions at work. Workers also tend to seek social support as a mechanism to reduce stress and burnout. Social support buffers the negative effects of stress on health-related outcomes and is inversely associated with both burnout and perceived stress. However, recent research has revealed that not all social support is beneficial. Co-rumination, or excessive negative problem talk about an issue, has been linked to increasing levels of stress and burnout. Working adults (N = 447) completed a survey exploring the relationships between social support, co-rumination, stress, and burnout. Two mediation models predicted that co-rumination would suppress the relationships between social support and both burnout and perceived stress. Data supported both partial mediation hypotheses. This study concludes that some social support can be less-than-beneficial, if the content of the supportive transaction focuses on excessive and negative problem talk.

Introduction: Distressed individuals are often reluctant to seek help (Biddle et al., 2004); when they do, they are more likely to seek help from family and friends instead of mental health professionals (Ashley, 2005). Given the rising rates of mental disorders, it seems pertinent to examine factors that influence formal help-seeking behaviors (FHS). Research has suggested that personality traits are predictors of FHS (Rickwood et al., 1994; Tijhuis, 1990); recent studies have started to suggest that mindfulness influences academic help-seeking behaviors in college undergraduates (Howell et al., 2011). Further, other studies have shown that rumination is not only related to lowered help-seeking behaviors (e.g., Kakhnovets, 2011), but also lowered levels of mindfulness (Raes & Williams, 2010). Because of the complex interplay between rumination and mindfulness no study has yet investigated the impact of mindfulness on the relationship between rumination and FHS. In this study, we attempted to elucidate the relationship, and hypothesized that (1) mindfulness positively correlate with FHS, and that (2) rumination would mediate the mindfulness–FHS relationship. 
Method: 179 healthy undergraduates from National University of Singapore (21.8 ± 1.6 years of age; 56% female; 88% ethnically Chinese) participated in this cross-sectional study. Participants filled out a pen-and-paper questionnaire comprising validated measures of (1) mindfulness, the Five-factor Mindfulness Questionnaire – Short Form (FFMQ-SF; Bohlmeijer et al., 2011); (2) rumination, the Ruminative Response Style Questionnaire, (RRS; Nolen-Hoeksema & Morrow, 1991); and (3) FHS, the vignette version of the General Help-seeking Questionnaire (GHSQ-V; Wilson et al., 2005).
Results: Inconsistent with our first hypothesis, a preliminary look presented no significant relationship between mindfulness and FHS; however, further analyses revealed that this was because only two of the FFMQ-SF subscales, observing and non-judging, were correlated to GHSQ-V, rs = −.02 and .17, respectively. While rumination was negatively correlated with FHS, we discovered that only the reflection subscale of the RRS was correlated with aspects of the FFMQ-SF and the GHSQ-V. Mediation analyses revealed a full significant positive mediation of reflection on the link between non-judging and FHS (Sobel’s z = 2.46, p = .01) but a partial significant negative mediation of reflection on the link between observing and FHS (Sobel’s z = -2.10, p = .03).
Discussion and Conclusions: The results of our study preliminarily suggest that there are differential roles of both rumination and mindfulness on FHS. Clinicians and practitioners alike should be wary of wholeheartedly embracing all aspects of mindfulness-based interventions: the non-judging aspect of mindfulness improves FHS, while the observing aspect seems to lower FHS. Further, reflective, and not brooding, rumination seems to be the conduit through which mindfulness influences FHS. As such, in the interest of improving FHS, there is a greater urgency in emphasizing reflective rumination in the context of being non-judgmental, but not in that of being observant.

[Excerpts from the penultimate draft. Includes the front matter, the first section of the preamble, and chapter 1.] *Self-Reflection for the Opaque Mind* attempts to solve a grave problem about critical self-reflection. The worry is that we critical thinkers are all in “epistemic bad faith” in light of what psychology tells us. For the research shows not merely that we are bad at detecting “ego-threatening” thoughts à la Freud. It also indicates that we are ignorant of even our ordinary thoughts—e.g., reasons for our moral judgments of others (Haidt 2001), and even mundane reasons for buying one pair of stockings over another! (Nisbett & Wilson 1977) However: Self-reflection presupposes an ability to know what one thinks in the first place. So if ignorance is the norm, why attempt self-reflection? The activity would just show naivety about psychology. Yet while respecting all the data, this book argues that, remarkably, we are infallible in a (limited) range self-discerning judgments. Even so, infallibility does not imply indubitability, and there is no Cartesian ambition to provide a “foundation” for empirical knowledge. The point is rather to explain how self-reflection as a rational activity is possible.

Self-pity is a frequent response to stressful events. So far, however, empirical research has paid only scant attention to this subject. The present article aims at exploring personality characteristics associated with individual differences in feeling sorry for oneself. Two studies with N = 141 and N = 161 university students were conducted, employing multidimensional measures of personality, control beliefs, anger, loneliness, and adult attachment. With respect to personality, results showed strong associations of self-pity with neuroticism, particularly with the depression facet. With respect to control beliefs, individuals high in self-pity showed generalized externality beliefs, seeing themselves as con¬trolled by both chance and powerful others. With respect to anger expression, self-pity was primarily related to anger-in. Strong connections with anger rumination were also found. Further¬more, individuals high in self-pity reported emotional loneliness and ambivalent-worrisome attachments. Finally, in both studies, a strong correlation with gender was found, with women reporting more self-pity reactions to stress than men. Findings are discussed with respect to how they support, extend, and qualify the previous literature on self-pity, and directions for future empirical research are pointed out.

The present chapter addresses the relations between worry, thoughts, and images. It is organized into three parts. Part 1 outlines T. D. Borkovec’s avoidance theory of worry, namely that worry reduces aversive imagery. Part 2 considers two mechanisms by which worry may reduce imagery, namely limitation of processing resources and verbal abstraction. Moreover, as there is little evidence for the first, but some evidence for the latter, Part 2 presents a new conceptual model of the relations between worry, thoughts, and images. Part 3 presents a brief outline beyond anxiety research on how avoidance theory and the verbal abstraction hypothesis may relate to the phenomenon of ruminative coping with depression.

Rumination has been linked with a number of deleterious outcomes, though relatively little is known about self-evaluative and emotion processes by which it develops. The current investigation uses a prospective, longitudinal design and self-report measures to examine the role of contingent self-worth, perfectionism, negative emotion beliefs, and suppression of negative emotion in predicting the development of brooding and reflective forms of rumination among 168 adolescents (98 girls, 79.6% European-American) under- going the transition to high school (Mage 1⁄4 13.58). Results of structural equation modeling indicate that self-evaluative vulnerability (i.e., self-worth contingencies, perfectionism) and negative emotion beliefs, but not the suppression of negative emotion, predict brooding (but not reflective) rumination. The current study demonstrates how brooding is intertwined with views of self and core assumptions about emotion.

Perfectionism is a multidimensional construct, with some dimensions being adaptive (perfectionistic strivings) and others maladaptive (perfectionistic concerns). Evidence shows that perfectionistic concerns increase risk for depression because they foster rumination. In this paper two aspects of rumination are disentangled, i.e. abstract-analytical (AA) vs. concrete experiential (CE), to show that depressive effects of perfectionism are associated with the AA rumination, whereas CE rumination should conversely be associated to perfectionistic strivings and unrelated to depression. Questionnaires assessing rumination, perfectionism and depressive symptoms were administered to 174 non-clinical participants. Consistent with hypotheses, results showed that AA rumination fully mediates the relationship between perfectionistic concerns and depressive symptoms. However, no complementary association was found between perfectionistic strivings and CE. Theoretical implications about adaptiveness of perfectionistic strivings, as well as cognitive treatment implications, are addressed in the discussion.

Maladaptive coping with failure can cause considerable distress and impairment. This study tested a novel cognitive strategy that induces participants to process both the value (“why”) and means (“how”) of reengaging in adaptive goal-pursuit after a failure. Students (N=263) received bogus failure feedback on an academic test battery, and were randomly assigned to Why-only, How-only, or Combined (How+Why) goal-focused processing, or a “free-thinking” Control condition, before completing a second battery. Cognitive performance, rumination, and negative affect during both batteries were assessed. Trait rumination and an aggregate of emotion-related symptoms were examined as moderators. Results in the overall sample were mixed, with Combined and Control participants both showing some benefits from training. Notably, among high-ruminative and high-symptom participants, Combined training yielded the greatest improvement in reading comprehension and rumination, as expected. Results, though mixed, suggest this novel cognitive strategy may hold promise for enhancing failure resilience in emotionally vulnerable samples.

This is the presentation that was part of a talk I gave as part of the University of Oxford's 2021 seminar series "Spring into Science: Queer Representation in Research". It is a self-reflective and personal piece in which I relate the revelation of my own queer identity to my research on liminal space in archaeology.

Background and objectives: Rumination is a major contributor to the maintenance of affective disorders
and has been linked to memory control deficits. However, ruminators often report intentionally engaging
in repetitive thought due to its perceived benefits. Deliberate re-processing may lead to the appearance
of a memory control deficit that is better explained as a difference in cognitive style.
Methods: Ninety-six undergraduate students volunteered to take part in a direct-suppression variant of
the Think/No-Think paradigm after which they completed self-report measures of rumination and the
degree to which they deliberately re-processed the to-be-suppressed items.
Results: We demonstrate a relation between rumination and impaired suppression-induced forgetting.
This relation is robust even when controlling for deliberate re-processing of the to-be-suppressed items,
a behavior itself related to both rumination and suppression. Therefore, whereas conscious fixation on
to-be-suppressed items reduced memory suppression, it did not fully account for the relation between
rumination and memory suppression.
Limitations: The current experiment employed a retrospective measure of deliberate re-processing in the
context of an unscreened university sample; future research might therefore generalize our findings
using an online measure of deliberate re-processing or within a clinical population.
Conclusions: We provide evidence that deliberate re-processing accounts for some e but not all e of the
relation between rumination and suppression-induced forgetting. The present findings, observed in a
paradigm known to engage top-down inhibitory modulation of mnemonic processing, provide the most
theoretically focused evidence to date for the existence of a memory control deficit in rumination.

Both lay concept and scientific theory have embraced the view that nonpathological worry may be helpful for defining and analyzing problems. To evaluate the quality of problem elaborations, concreteness is a key variable. Two studies with nonclinical student samples are presented in which participants elaborated topics associated with different degrees of worry. In Study 1, participants' elaborations were assessed using problem elaboration charts; in Study 2, they were assessed using catastrophizing interviews. When participants' problem elaborations were rated for concreteness, both studies showed an inverse relationship between degree of worry and concreteness: The more participants worried about a given topic the less concrete was the content of their elaboration. The results challenge the view that worry may promote better problem analyses. Instead they conform to the view that worry is a cognitive avoidance response.

There is a link between personality and the emotional tone of autobiographical memory. Across three studies we explored neuroticism in relation to the fading affect bias (FAB), which refers to the greater fading of unpleasant compared to pleasant emotions in autobiographical memory. One characteristic of neuroticism is the tendency to ruminate over,or repeatedly think about, past unpleasant events, so we also explored event rehearsal and rumination as a mediating process. We found that with increasing neuroticism, there was an associated increase in the frequency to which unpleasant events were privately rehearsed, which in turn was linked to less fading of negative affect.  Study 2 showed this effect was specific to rehearsal with the goal to reflect on the event, with Study 3 further clarifying the mediating effect was due to increased frequency of the reflective sub-type of rumination. These results generalized across undergraduate samples and the general population in the UK.  We offer new insights into the effects of neuroticism on autobiographical memory and suggest that reflective rumination can be linked to the retention of negative affect in individuals with high neuroticism, which can be interpreted as an indication of maladaptive emotional processing.

(11) (PDF) Reflective rumination mediates the effects of neuroticism upon the fading affect bias in autobiographical memory. Available from: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/358617748_Reflective_rumination_mediates_the_effects_of_neuroticism_upon_the_fading_affect_bias_in_autobiographical_memory#fullTextFileContent [accessed Feb 18 2022].

The Penn State Worry Questionnaire (PSWQ) is a self-report scale of pathological worry. It contains 16 items that cover excessiveness, duration, uncontrollability and associated distress of worry as experienced by clients diagnosed with GAD (e.g., "Many situations make me worry"; "I find it easy to dismiss worrisome thoughts", reverse-scored). Of the 16 items, 5 are reverse-scored. With a five-point answer scale from Not at all typical of me (1) to Very typical of me (5), the potential range of PSWQ total scores is 16-80. Reference values for nonclinical, analog, and clinical groups can be found in Molina and Borkvoc (1994; see also Gillis, Haaga, & Ford, 1995).

The aim of this study was to examine the relationship between temperament, ruminative thought style and social anxiety using latent variable modeling. Before examining the integrated model that specifies the relations between the constructs, relevant measurement issues were examined. The study was conducted on a heterogeneous sample from the general population that included 1,029 participants (62.1% female) aged 19 to 79. The findings show that the Behavioural Inhibition System is the most important vulnerability factor for the development of social anxiety, and it has both a direct effect and an indirect one through the ruminative thought style. Also, Freeze has an additional contribution to the increased experience of social anxiety. The Behavioural Approach System has complex effects on social anxiety-with a direct protective effect, and indirectly-with a facilitation of the ruminative thought style. Thus, BAS can also act as a risk factor. The findings support the revised Reinforcement Sensitivity Theory and provide a basis for the extension of the Kimbrel's Mediation Model of Social Anxiety.

This is the transcript of a talk I gave as part of the University of Oxford's 2021 seminar series "Spring into Science: Queer Representation in Research". It is a self-reflective and personal piece in which I relate the revelation of my own queer identity to my research on liminal space in archaeology.

Background: Given the high prevalence of cancer patients with comorbid depression, the present study sought to elucidate the relationships between two vulnerability factors, dysfunctional attitudes and rumination, and their influence on non-somatic depressive symptomatology in an Asian cohort of cancer patients. It was hypothesised that all variables of interest would be inter-correlated, and that both dysfunctional attitudes and rumination would mediate one another in influencing non-somatic depressive symptoms.
Methods: 194 recently diagnosed mixed-cancer patients in Singapore (Mage = 49.2 ± 9.2 years; 68% women; 61% ethnically Chinese), without any comorbid psychiatric diagnosis, completed the Dysfunctional Attitudes Scale Form A, Rumination Responses Scale (comprising brooding and reflective rumination), and Hospital Anxiety and Depression Scale.
Results: Correlational analyses revealed that all variables were inter-correlated (rhos[194] = .35–.52). Bootstrapping mediation analyses controlling for gender and treatment received revealed that both brooding and reflective rumination mediated the relationship between dysfunctional attitudes and non-somatic depressive symptoms, and that dysfunctional attitudes also mediated the relationship between both brooding and reflective rumination and non-somatic depressive symptoms.
Conclusions: Findings suggest that, in cancer patients, both dysfunctional attitudes and rumination seem to act upon one other, in a feedback loop, to influence non-somatic depressive symptomatology. Clinicians may therefore have a wider range of treatments to choose from in managing cancer patients with depressive symptomatology.

The notion and practice of “field-work” are usually taken from granted and treated as a technical question (i.e. how to “properly” gather “the data”). However, many critical perspectives have shown that the (social) sciences are implicated in power relations. Thus, “field-work” needs to be interrogated in nuanced ways. Where is the “field”? Why are some countries frequently treated by scholars as producers of the “state of the art” (theory) while others are imagined as the place to gather data and do field-work? Does “field-work” finish when one arrives back to Pearson? Should this “epistemology of the adventurer” be challenged? Why “the poor”, “indigenous communities”, “subaltern groups” are seen, studied, talked about, and conceptually dissected while ethnographies and studies of the rich and powerful are rare? And what kind of ethical and epistemological commitments does that entail?  Are graduate students of Canadian universities really that “privileged” in comparison to the “people” they “study” or the story is in some cases more complicated than that? What does the common lament about “how privileged we are” actually “do”, both politically and ethically? In sum, in what sense “field-work” can be seen as a power relation and academia as politically relevant? Our presenters will address some of these and other issues through their own research experience.

The reliability and validity of the Penn State Worry Questionnaire (PSWQ) and the Worry Domains Questionnaire (WDQ) were examined with self-ratings from a non-clinical sample of 148 students in a test-retest design across four weeks. Ratings from three well-acquainted peers were also obtained. With internal consistencies and test-retest correlations of at least 0.85, the present study confirmed the high reliability of the questionnaires. Moreover, both measures demonstrated substantial convergent validity: Average agreement among peers was 0.42 (PSWQ) and 0.47 (WDQ), and aggregated self-peer agreement was 0.55 (PSWQ) and 0.49 (WDQ). Self-peer agreement was not biased by social desirability. These findings challenge views that worry is an unreliable and unobservable phenomenon.

When I asked students, in the early stages of my "Contemplation Music Writing Project," to write about their inner experiences while listening to music, I did not push them to write at least 100 words for their contemplations. Instead, I said they can write just 1 line as a response to their experience, which many followed through on. Looking back at these student writings from the 70s, they looked more like TWEETS from Twitter. And that's another possible approach to the writing task: ask students to com pose a TWEET that describes their inner experiences: "less is more." And in that single sentence or TWEET, a lot was expressed that was relevant to the child's life and made sense. I believe the idea of asking kids to compose a TWEET to describe their experiences would become a motivation for writing and thinking both creatively and critically.

This study examined an experiential avoidance conceptualization of depressive rumination in 3 ways: 1) associations among questionnaire measures of rumination, experiential avoidance, and fear of emotions; 2) performance on a dichotic listening task that highlights preferences for non-depressive material; and 3) psychophysiological reactivity in an avoidance paradigm modeled after the one used by Borkovec, Lyonfields, Wiser, and Deihl (1993) in their examination of worry. One hundred and thirty-eight undergraduates completed questionnaire measures and participated in a clinical interview to diagnose current and past episodes of depression. Of those, 100 were randomly assigned to a rumination or relaxation induction condition and participated in a dichotic listening task, rumination/relaxation induction, and depression induction. Questionnaire measures confirmed a relationship between rumination status and avoidance; however, no significant effects were found in the dichotic listening task. Psychophysiological measures indicated no difference in physiological response to a depression induction among high ruminators (HR). However, low ruminators (LR) in the relaxation condition exhibited a larger IBI response than LR in the rumination condition. Overall, these results provide partial support for an avoidance conceptualization of depressive rumination. Implications of these findings are discussed.

Previous research has suggested that a construct similar to mindfulness might be adaptive for ruminators. In this exploratory cross-sectional study, we show that mindfulness is a mediator, and not a moderator, of the link between rumination and help-seeking. we also show that one aspect of mindfulness, non-reactivity, seems to moderate this link. Clinical implications are discussed.