Co-Rumination Partially Mediates the Relationship Between Social Support and Emotional Exhaustion Among Graduate Students

Abstract

Graduate students regularly report high levels of stress and burnout. Many of those same students utilize social support networks, which can act as stress buffers. This study evaluated excessive negative talk about issues (co-rumination) and its effects on that social support-to-burnout (emotional exhaustion) relationship and predicted that co-rumination would act as a suppressor variable. Graduate student volunteers (N = 213) reported their levels of social support, co-rumination, and emotional exhaustion. Data indicated that co-rumination did mediate the social support-to-emotional exhaustion relationship on 2 dimensions. This project purports that, although social support is important, the content of socially supportive interactions may also be important when attempting to intervene in stressful situations, especially when those interactions involve co-ruminative messages.

Keywords:

• Burnout
• Co-Rumination
• Graduate School
• Social Support

Acknowledgments

The author would like to thank Drs. Sarah J. Tracy, Paul King, Alice E. Veksler, and two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments on earlier drafts.

Notes

*p < .05. **p < .01 (two-tailed).

A composite emotional exhaustion score was evaluated in a separate model by avererging the z scores (to account for scaling differences) for both frequency and severity. The nature of the two models reported in the Results section do not differ when evaluating emotional exhaustion as one outcome variable (R ² = .082; adjusted R ² = .073), F(2, 207) = 9.28, p < .001; bootstrap (5,000 iterations, 95% confidence interval) bias-corrected and accelerated confidence interval =.0179 to .1785. Therefore, the two models using frequency and severity as separate outcomes are reported herein, as suggested by the authors of the original burnout inventory.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Justin P. Boren

Justin P. Boren (Ph.D., Arizona State University, 2010) is an assistant professor in the Department of Communication at Santa Clara University.