Depressive rumination: testing the analytical rumination hypothesis in patients with depressive disorder

Depression is commonly viewed as a pathology. Depressive rumination, one of the key symptoms of depression is thought to be a maladaptive cognitive style that contributes to worse and longer depressive episodes. Here I present an alternative approach called the analytical rumination hypothesis (ARH). ARH proposes that depression is an evolved response to complex analytical problems. In a study on inmate patients of the National institute of mental health in Klecany with diagnosed depression we tested the validity of the ARH through assessing the influence of depressive rumination on mood, cognitive performance and electrophysiological correlates. Rumination was experimentally induced by expressive writing. In the control condition we used the distractive writing method. The results show a corresponding effect of rumination on the mood of our patients as expected. However, we were not able to see the proposed effects on cognitive abilities. KEY WORDS Depression, rumination, adaptation, cognition, affective state, neural correlate