Rumination and inhibitory difficulties: exploring the role of state rumination with emotionally self-relevant words

The aim of this project was to examine the roles of working memory capacity, depressive symptoms, and rumination (state and trait) in inhibitory difficulties with self-relevant emotional words following a rumination/distraction manipulation using the negative affective priming cognitive task. It was hypothesized that brooding would predict inhibitory difficulties with negative rather than positive self-relevant words in a non-clinical undergraduate sample (N = 148). Additionally, it was proposed that state rumination would play a mediating role in the relationship between brooding and inhibitory difficulties with emotional words, a relationship that would be further moderated by working memory capacity. Though brooding marginally predicted negative bias scores using multiple regression, this valence-specific finding was not confirmed with multi-level statistical analysis. Results failed to support the proposed moderated meditational model, a finding that may be impacted by restricted range of dysphoric affect in the sample. However, results from linear regression indicated that brooding predicted state rumination regardless of condition