Rumination and self-reflection in stress narratives and relations to psychological functioning

ABSTRACT

The longitudinal study aims to expand what is known about the costs and benefits of narrating stressful experiences by exploring changes in rumination within the narrative process and comparing it to changes in self-reflection. Rumination (e.g., brooding, self-criticism, and negative emotions) and self-reflection were measured in stress narratives of 56 college students. There were several goals: (1) examine changes in narrative rumination and narrative self-reflection over 3 days of writing, (2) examine the relations among the changes in narrative rumination variables and narrative self-reflection and (3) examine how changes in narrative rumination and narrative self-reflection relate to multiple measures of psychological functioning. Overall, individuals increased self-reflection over the 3-day writing task. Individuals who increased ruminative brooding across the 3 days of writing showed lower ego identity development (short term and long term) and self-esteem (short term), while increased self-criticism was positively correlated with identity distress (short term). Implications of the different aspects of narrative rumination, specifically in the context of stressful experiences, are discussed.

KEYWORDS:

• Autobiographical memory
• narrative
• rumination
• psychological functioning

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

¹Early conceptualizations of rumination include reflection or pondering as adaptive components of rumination (Nolen-Hoeksema & Morrow, 1991). However, some research (Trapnell & Campbell, 1999; Treynor et al., 2003) provided support for rumination and reflection as separate self-attentive processes, rather than reflection as a subtype of rumination. This later conceptualization identifies rumination as maladaptive.

²Using a series of paired samples t-test, differences between day 1 and day 2, and then day 2 and day 3 were examined. There were very few differences to report. There was a significant decrease in general information between day 1 and day 2. In addition, there was a significant decrease in ruminative brooding between day 2 and day 3. Data from day 2 of writing were not considered further.

³Independent samples t-tests were conducted to examine the possible differences on each of the baseline measures between the two writing conditions. There were no differences between the groups for any of the three measures at baseline.