Brooding and attentional control in processing self-encoded information: Evidence from a modified Garner task

Abstract

The association between brooding and reflection, components of rumination, and attentional control, was examined using a novel executive attention task. Participants (n=156) self-encoded words from two semantic categories by providing autobiographical memories involving the words. They subsequently classified the self-encoded and non-self encoded (new) words into the two semantic categories. The degree to which stimuli self-encoding interfered with semantic classification was used as a measure of attentional control impairment. Whereas brooding was positively associated with attentional impairment, reflection was negatively associated with such impairment. These associations were not attributable to current depression levels or to differences in the nature (valence and meaningfulness) of the autobiographical memories generated by participants. These findings emphasise the importance of self-referential processing biases in rumination.

Keywords:

• Rumination
• Brooding
• Executive attention
• Self
• Bias

Acknowledgements

This research was supported by a grant from the Binational Science Foundation (BSF 2003–308–02) to NM and JW.

This research was conducted as the MA thesis of the first author supervised by Nilly Mor and Eva Gilboa-Schechtman.

Notes

¹We combined the two baseline conditions to ensure that in both the baseline and the orthogonal conditions half the stimuli were previously self-encoded and half were not, and thus the interference index was not confounded with prior exposure to the experimental stimuli.

²Zero-order correlations indicated that age and gender were unrelated to brooding, reflection, depression or the Garner interference. Therefore, they were not included in the models.

³The results were the same when the baseline conditions were not collapsed across self-relevant and non-self-relevant stimuli. Specifically, we conducted a repeated-measures analysis, predicting RT, with Condition (baseline vs. orthogonal) and Stimulus Self-relevance (previously self-encoded or not) as within subjects predictors and brooding, reflection, and depression as between-subjects predictors. Although the interaction between condition and self-relevance was significant, F(1, 152) = 8.79, p<.01, self-relevance did not moderate the relationship between brooding, reflection or depression and the Garner interference.

⁴A replication of the current experiment took place (n=46) with one significant modification. In this study, during the encoding phase, participants were asked to write a lexical description of the stimuli, rather than encoding the words in a self-referential manner. Overall, there was no difference between RTs in the baseline and orthogonal conditions, F(1, 34) = 0.06, p>.05. In addition, brooding, reflection, and depression were entered simultaneously into a regression model predicting the Garner interference. The overall model was non-significant, R ²=.09, F(3, 42) = 1.37, p=.27, and none of the predictors were significant. The results of this study suggest that it is self-encoding rather than prior exposure to the experimental stimuli that is responsible for the link between rumination and attention biases.