Attentional Bias And Interpretation Bias Of High Trait Rumination Individuals

When we encounter negative events or stressful events,they put us in a negative emotional state.The severity and persistence of this negative emotional response can be predicted by the extent to which people ruminate.Trait rumination is a way of thinking about negative contents over and over again,which refers to individuals’ longterm thinking about themselves,emotions,negative events,etc.State rumination is an individual’s response in a specific situation(such as when facing pressure),and it is a temporary response based on situational cues.The tendency to engage in ruminant is associated with decreased cognitive flexibility.The present study investigated the characteristics of attentional bias and explanatory bias of high trait ruminants under calm and state ruminant by experimental methods.Our study was conducted to investigate the attentional bias and explanatory bias of high trait rumination individuals under calm conditions.Experiment 1 using point detection paradigm to investigate high trait rumination individuals to negative emotions,sadness,anger face attention bias,experiment of high and low trait rumination two individual participants completed to a neutral-neutral,neutral-happy,neutral-sad,for prompt information point detection task.The results showed that high trait ruminant individuals had difficulty in disengaging attention from negative emotional faces,while low trait ruminant individuals did not have attention bias towards different emotional faces.In Experiment 2,participants with high and low traits were asked to complete an emotion recognition task using a mixture of sad and happy faces,i.e.to judge whether a face was sad or happy.The results showed that there were significant differences in the interpretation bias of fuzzy faces between high and low trait ruminants.High trait ruminants tended to interpret fuzzy faces as negative,while low trait ruminants tended to interpret fuzzy faces as positive.The second study discusses the state rumination of individuals with high trait rumination individuals and low trait rumination individuals under induced state rumination,as well as their attentional bias and explanatory bias.In experiment 3,the TSST task was used to induce the state rumination of two individuals,and then the point detection paradigm was used to investigate the attentional bias of high-trait ruminations to negative emotions(sad)faces under the state rumination.The results showed that the state ruminant level,stress level and negative emotion level of high trait ruminants were higher than those of low trait ruminants under experimentally induced state ruminant.In addition,there were significant differences in attentional bias between high and low trait ruminants under state ruminant.High trait ruminants showed accelerated attentional orientation to positive emotional faces,and dissociated attentional bias to negative emotional faces,which was not consistent with the characteristics of attentional bias between the two groups under calm state.In Experiment 4,we investigated the interpretive bias of high and low trait ruminants under state rumination.The results showed that high trait ruminants tended to interpret fuzzy faces as negative,while low trait ruminants tended to interpret fuzzy faces as positive,which was consistent with the interpretive bias of the two groups of participants under state rumination.Conclusion of this research:(1)High trait rumination has attentional bias to negative stimuli and tends to interpret ambiguous stimuli as negative.In the condition of state ruminant,it is beneficial for high trait ruminants to switch from negative to positive stimuli,but it does not relieve their tendency to interpret fuzzy stimuli as negative.Therefore,the explanatory bias of high-trait ruminants is relatively stable,while the attentional bias of high-trait ruminants is easily affected.The findings of this study suggest that we can reduce the attention to negative stimuli and see the positive side of life by inducing the state rumination of high-trait individuals.