Department of Psychology, Yale University.
Clinical Psychology Department, Complutense University of Madrid.
Emotion. 2019 Dec;19(8):1450-1462. doi: 10.1037/emo0000535. Epub 2019 Feb 4.
Worry and rumination, two cardinal responses to emotional events, are key for maintaining negative emotion and have been implicated in the etiology and maintenance of anxiety and depressive disorders. Though worry and rumination are highly correlated with one another and people who engage in one often engage in both, they may differentially affect emotion. Specifically, previous work suggests that worry helps people avoid (intense) emotion, while rumination provokes it. Examining the ways in which these two forms of repetitive negative thinking (RNT) influence cognitive processing of emotional material may help us better understand the emotional sequelae of worry and rumination. This study examines visual attention to emotional information, since attending to certain types of information opens the door for further processing of it. The current study induced worry and rumination and then used eye tracking to compare how each form of RNT influenced the allocation of attention to emotional scenes. Participants induced to worry, compared with those induced to ruminate, spent less time viewing positive (vs. neutral) scenes and were the only group to preferentially maintain their attention on negative images when they were paired with positive images. These findings suggest that worry, compared with rumination, leads to the relative avoidance of positive information. Implications of these findings for research on mood and anxiety disorders are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).
担忧和反刍，两种对情绪事件的主要反应，是维持负性情绪的关键，并且与焦虑和抑郁障碍的病因和维持有关。虽然担忧和反刍彼此高度相关，而且经常同时发生，但它们可能会对情绪产生不同的影响。具体来说，先前的研究表明，担忧有助于人们避免（强烈的）情绪，而反刍则会引发情绪。研究这两种形式的重复消极思维（RNT）如何影响对情绪材料的认知处理，可能有助于我们更好地理解担忧和反刍的情绪后果。本研究考察了对情绪信息的视觉注意，因为关注某些类型的信息为进一步处理它打开了大门。本研究诱导了担忧和反刍，然后使用眼动追踪来比较每种形式的 RNT 如何影响对情绪场景的注意力分配。与被诱导反刍的参与者相比，被诱导担忧的参与者观看积极（而非中性）场景的时间更少，并且当与积极场景配对时，他们是唯一一组优先保持对负面图像注意力的组。这些发现表明，与反刍相比，担忧会导致对积极信息的相对回避。这些发现对情绪和焦虑障碍的研究具有启示意义。（APA 版权所有 2019）。
