There is a obvious difference between depressive rumination and anxious rumination. For a depressive rumination, the patient is focused inwards, and anxious rumination is where the patient is fixated outwards. I am eager to be that cognitive testing for anxious patients would be “all over the map” so to speak. I think that these cognitive tests aren’t a good evaluation of how a people will act on an actual life assignment because of the truth that their assignment will be hindered by their self-perception.
Depressive rumination, which includes persistent ideas concentrated on the reasons, meanings, and consequences of a depressed feeling, is usually linked to poor performance on demanding thoughts and reasoning tasks.
One idea is that rumination consumes important cognitive resources that could otherwise be devoted to the task at hand, even if what you are doing is not emotion-inducing in nature. However, a new paper published last week in Psychological Science suggests that it’s not necessarily ruminative thinkers’ ongoing rumination that negatively impacts their performance, rather it’s their tendency to be mentally inflexible that does the damage. Moreover, this new research also shows that this mental inflexibility is not always bad. As it happens, when faced with a situation where you have to maintain a single goal in the face of diversion, your ruminative tendencies may actually work to your advantage.
University of Colorado psychologists Lee Altamirano, Akira Miyake and Anson Whitmer measured people’s tendency to engage in depressive rumination and also asked them to perform two demanding cognitive tasks. One task, the letter naming task, emphasized fast-past switching between goals. People were shown letters and were cued to read them aloud from left to right or right to left. Frequently, the left/right cue switched and people had to rapidly switch the direction they were reading the letters. As you can see, mental inflexibility is potentially a bad thing here. The other task emphasized maintaining a goal in memory.
In this modified Stroop task, people were presented with color words and instructed to name the color of the word while ignoring the meaning. On most trials this was easy because the color and the word name matched. Every so often, however, the color didn’t match the word. To succeed at this task, you have to remember your goal and not be tempted to actually read the word.
Not surprisingly, the higher people’s depressive rumination tendencies, the worse they did on the letter naming task. However, the researchers found the opposite for the modified Stroop task. The more likely people were to depressively ruminate, the better they did. Keep in mind that the folks who were studied in the current work were college students, so whether these findings generalize to severely depressed individuals remains to be seen.
There is no doubt that depressive rumination has negative consequences: reduced motivation and increases in the severity and bouts of depression to name a few. This new research contributes to a growing body of working showing some potential benefits of rumination – and gives the specifics of how and when one’s ruminative tendencies might actually be beneficial. Simply put, the “sticky minds” that seem to go hand in hand with rumination help people out in situations where they have to maintain a goal in mind in the face of diversion.
Successfully navigating through daily life often calls for rival demands. There are times when you have to flexibility shift between different targets – for example, when you are simultaneously engaged on three projects at the job and have to quickly move your attention between them. However, there are also situations where you should keep a single target and keep away from diversion. When you find yourself in the car on the way home, for example, and are attempting to remember to pick up milk at the grocery store while the children are nagging you for seven other supermarket, the cell is ringing, and ideas about work the following day are running through your head, your ruminative tendencies just might work to your advantage.
I think a quite simple solution is to only use a sticky note being a reminder to pick up the milk. No need whatsoever to ruminate about it in the face of those other distractions. Additionally, rumination can also be a middle characteristic of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder.
Depressive rumination, which includes persistent ideas concentrated on the reasons, meanings, and consequences of a depressed feeling, is usually linked to poor performance on demanding thoughts and reasoning tasks.
One idea is that rumination consumes important cognitive resources that could otherwise be devoted to the task at hand, even if what you are doing is not emotion-inducing in nature. However, a new paper published last week in Psychological Science suggests that it’s not necessarily ruminative thinkers’ ongoing rumination that negatively impacts their performance, rather it’s their tendency to be mentally inflexible that does the damage. Moreover, this new research also shows that this mental inflexibility is not always bad. As it happens, when faced with a situation where you have to maintain a single goal in the face of diversion, your ruminative tendencies may actually work to your advantage.
University of Colorado psychologists Lee Altamirano, Akira Miyake and Anson Whitmer measured people’s tendency to engage in depressive rumination and also asked them to perform two demanding cognitive tasks. One task, the letter naming task, emphasized fast-past switching between goals. People were shown letters and were cued to read them aloud from left to right or right to left. Frequently, the left/right cue switched and people had to rapidly switch the direction they were reading the letters. As you can see, mental inflexibility is potentially a bad thing here. The other task emphasized maintaining a goal in memory.
In this modified Stroop task, people were presented with color words and instructed to name the color of the word while ignoring the meaning. On most trials this was easy because the color and the word name matched. Every so often, however, the color didn’t match the word. To succeed at this task, you have to remember your goal and not be tempted to actually read the word.
Not surprisingly, the higher people’s depressive rumination tendencies, the worse they did on the letter naming task. However, the researchers found the opposite for the modified Stroop task. The more likely people were to depressively ruminate, the better they did. Keep in mind that the folks who were studied in the current work were college students, so whether these findings generalize to severely depressed individuals remains to be seen.
There is no doubt that depressive rumination has negative consequences: reduced motivation and increases in the severity and bouts of depression to name a few. This new research contributes to a growing body of working showing some potential benefits of rumination – and gives the specifics of how and when one’s ruminative tendencies might actually be beneficial. Simply put, the “sticky minds” that seem to go hand in hand with rumination help people out in situations where they have to maintain a goal in mind in the face of diversion.
Successfully navigating through daily life often calls for rival demands. There are times when you have to flexibility shift between different targets – for example, when you are simultaneously engaged on three projects at the job and have to quickly move your attention between them. However, there are also situations where you should keep a single target and keep away from diversion. When you find yourself in the car on the way home, for example, and are attempting to remember to pick up milk at the grocery store while the children are nagging you for seven other supermarket, the cell is ringing, and ideas about work the following day are running through your head, your ruminative tendencies just might work to your advantage.
I think a quite simple solution is to only use a sticky note being a reminder to pick up the milk. No need whatsoever to ruminate about it in the face of those other distractions. Additionally, rumination can also be a middle characteristic of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder.
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