Cognitive Control and Rumination in Youth: The Importance of Emotion

Abstract

Rumination involves the tendency to passively dwell on negative emotions along with their meanings and consequences. Susan Nolen–Hoeksema demonstrated the role of rumination in the development of several forms of psychopathology and suggested that cognitive control may be one factor that makes some individuals more prone to ruminate than others. Studies with adults have consistently found that rumination is associated with cognitive control difficulties, especially related to switching and inhibiting emotional information. Because rumination predicts psychopathology by adolescence, the present study examined whether ruminating youth would show similar cognitive control difficulties. Fifty–two adolescents completed two tasks from the Cambridge Neuropsychological Test Automated Battery and reported on their depressive symptoms and tendency to ruminate. There was no effect of rumination on a task measuring general cognitive flexibility. However, rumination was associated with difficulty inhibiting negative information when switching from negative to positive blocks on an Affective Go/No–go task. Results suggest both similarities and differences compared to adult studies and are discussed in terms of clinical implications for the prevention and treatment of psychopathology.

Can’t Take My Eyes Off of You: Eye Tracking Reveals How Ruminating Young Adolescents Get Stuck

“…In addition, because we used a single task to assess attention, we cannot be sure whether attentional patterns among youth who ruminate are specific to emotional or more general stimuli. However, in another study of youth, rumination was associated with attentional patterns on an affective task but not a general cognitive task (Hilt et al, 2014). It will be important for future research to examine additional tasks with varying stimuli to better understand the extent of attentional patterns among youth who ruminate.…”

“…Second, this study extends research on the association between selective attention and rumination to a younger sample than has previously been examined. Now that a preliminary body of evidence suggests that attentional control difficulties are associated with rumination by early adolescence (also see Hilt et al, 2014; Romens & Pollak, 2012), we can examine the development of attentional control and rumination prospectively with younger samples to help understand the temporal relationships between these two processes. In addition, because rumination is associated with the development of psychopathology by adolescence (e.g., Rood et al, 2009), a greater understanding of this correlate could offer an avenue for prevention in the form of attention training.…”

“…Some research with adolescent samples has shown a relationship between effortful control and rumination (e.g., Hilt, Armstrong, & Essex, 2012; Verstraeten, Vasey, Raes, & Bijtteibier, 2009), and one study showed that rumination was associated with difficulty inhibiting negative emotional information on a switching task (Hilt, Leitzke, & Pollak, 2014). However, studies on specific attentional processes associated with rumination in younger samples are generally lacking.…”

Inflexible Cognition Predicts First Onset of Major Depressive Episodes in Adolescence

“…[10,[18][19][20][21][22][23] Aberrant attentional shifting may result in excessive internally oriented attention that results in failure to use external stimuli to disengage from rumination, rendering them inflexible to changes in environmental context. [10,23] Studies have demonstrated an inverse association between attentional shifting and rumination, [24] particularly in the context of negative emotional information, [18,25] although this association is less consistent among adolescents, with some studies finding no associations between attentional shifting for neutral stimuli and rumination. [20,26] Although it is plau-sible that deficits in attentional shifting and rumination are correlated, attentional shifting and rumination also could work synergistically such that rumination may be particularly likely to lead to depression among individuals who have difficulty switching attention away from ruminative processes.…”

Brain functional connectivity dynamics in the aftermaths of affective and cognitive events

“…Emotions are an essential component of mental life and adaptive behaviors, with profound impact on our perception, memories, actions, and thoughts. In particular, negative affect may impair the efficiency of high-level cognitive processes and reduce cognitive control (Hilt et al 2014). Further, experiencing negative emotions has been associated with cognitive inflexibility (Davis and Nolen-Hoeksema 2000) and difficulties in mental switching (Piguet et al 2010(Piguet et al , 2016.…”