The Effect Of Rumination On Cognitive Inhibition

Rumination consists of repetitively thinking about the causes, consequences, and symptoms of one’s negative affect. The tendency to engage in a ruminative process when distressed is a stable individual difference characteristic.Although it aims at regulate negative emotions, leading to the negative emotional experience strengthened dramatically.Studies have found that rumination is associated with the ability of keeping irrelevant material from entering working memory and removing irrelevant material from working memory.In this study, we conducted two experiments with the "ignore/surpress" and "negative priming/ surpress" task in college subjects. Distinguished the research on the ability to prevent depending on the origin of irrelevant information, investigating influence of rumination on the ability to prevent and remove.We found that:Firstly,the task of "ignore/surpress" and "negative priming/ surpress" can inspect the influence of rumination on the ability to prevent and remove effectively.The former tested the impact of rumination on the capacity to prevent irrelevant information from outside into the working memory and remove irrelevant material from working memory,while the latter tested the impact of rumination on the ability to stop irrelevant information from inside into the working memory and remove irrelevant material from working memory.Secondly, rumination damages the ability of preventing irrelevant material from inside into the working memory,especially these information is negative.Thirdly,rumination is independent of the ability to prevent irrelevant material from outside into the working memory.Finally,rumination does not affect one’s ability to remove irrelevant information from the working memory.