Brooding rumination and attentional biases in currently non-depressed individuals: an eye-tracking study

ABSTRACT

Both rumination and attentional biases have been proposed as key components of the RDoC Negative Valence Systems construct of Loss. Although theorists have proposed that rumination, particularly brooding rumination, should be associated with increased sustained attention to depression-relevant information, it is not clear whether this link would be observed in a non-depressed sample or whether it is specific to brooding versus reflective rumination. To address these questions, the current study examined the link between brooding rumination and attentional biases in a sample of non-depressed individuals (n = 105). Attentional biases were assessed using eye tracking during a passive viewing task in which participants were presented with 2 × 2 arrays of angry, happy, sad, and neutral faces. In line with predictions, higher levels of brooding rumination were associated with greater sustained attention to sad faces and less sustained attention to happy faces. These results remained significant after controlling for participants’ prior history of major depression and current nonclinical level of depressive symptoms, suggesting that the link between brooding rumination and attentional biases is at least partially independent of current or past depression.

KEYWORDS:

• Brooding rumination
• depression
• attention biases
• eye tracking
• sustained attention

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 The pattern of significant results was identical when we used raw gaze durations rather than proportion of gaze.

2 Because none of the relations between rumination and attention biases was moderated by epoch, we present proportion of attention for each emotion type averaged across all epochs in the table.

3 Although not a primary focus of the paper, our eye-tracking data allowed us to examine biases in initial orienting of attention (proportion of first fixations to certain emotional stimuli over others), which we would not expect to be linked to rumination. To examine this, we conducted general linear models with emotion (angry, happy, sad, and neutral) as the within-subject variable and brooding or reflection as a continuous independent variable. The proportion of first fixations to each emotion type was the dependent variable in each analysis. As expected, the brooding and reflection main effects, as well as the brooding × emotion and reflection × emotion, interactions were all non-significant (lowest p = .26). Exploratory analyses were also conducted to determine whether participants’ histories of MDD moderated any of the relations examined. None of these analyses was significant (lowest p = .14).

Additional information

Funding

This project was supported by National Institute of Mental Health [grant number MH098060] awarded to B.E. Gibb.