Appraisals and strategies associated with rumination and worry

Rumination (Nolen-Hoeksema, 1991) and worry (Borkovec, Ray, & Stober, 1998) are forms of recurrent negative thinking that are implicated in the maintenance of, respectively, depression and generalized anxiety disorder. However, despite their clinical significance, the mechanisms underlying rumination and worry are not well understood. This study aimed to test recent suggestions that particular appraisals and strategies in response to intrusive thoughts may be associated with increased tendency to ruminate and worry. 148 volunteers reported appraisals and strategies to worry and rumination-related intrusions (as measured with the Cognitive Intrusion Questionnaire) and the tendency to ruminate and tendency to worry, as measured by the Response Styles Questionnaire and the Penn State Worry Questionnaire, respectively. Increased tendency to ruminate was associated with a greater need to understand a situation, increased personal importance of the situation and the strategies of analysing a situation and dwelling on the causes and meanings of situations. Increased tendency to worry was associated with greater disapproval of worry-related intrusions, and with the strategy of replacing a worrisome intrusion with another unpleasant thought. These correlational findings are consistent with meta-cognitive (Watkins & Baracaia, 2001) and goal-discrepancy accounts (Martin & Tesser, 1996) of rumination, and with a cognitive avoidance account of worry (Borkovec et al., 1998).

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