Effects of rumination and distraction on working memory performance in individuals with depressive tendencies and trait anxiety.

BACKGROUND

Rumination prolongs depressive mood and impairs executive functioning including working memory and attentional control, even in healthy individuals. Distraction can potentially counteract these effects; however, many experimental paradigms have relied on neutral, self-unrelated content and have failed to reflect the self-focused nature of everyday rumination or the possible benefits of emotionally meaningful distractions. This study investigated the effects of rumination and positive and neutral distractions based on personally relevant content on working memory performance in healthy undergraduate students with varying levels of depressive and anxiety tendencies.

METHODS

Participants completed an operation-span task at three time points: baseline, immediately after rumination induction, and immediately after distraction induction. The induction phases involved participants reflecting on self-relevant negative events (rumination) or self-relevant positive/neutral events (distractions).

RESULTS

Working memory performance significantly improved only among participants with higher depressive tendencies and trait anxiety after engaging in brief, self-relevant positive thinking, compared with performance after rumination induction. This suggests that emotionally meaningful distraction temporarily facilitates recovery of executive functioning by releasing cognitive resources previously consumed by ruminative processing.

LIMITATIONS: This study included healthy undergraduate students. Further research should determine whether similar effects are observed in populations with clinical depression.

CONCLUSIONS

Self-relevant positive distractions may enhance executive functioning, particularly in individuals vulnerable to rumination such as those with depressive tendencies or trait anxiety. These results provide insight into low-intensity content-based strategies for cognitive recovery after negative thought engagement and have potential applications in preventive interventions for subclinical emotional dysregulation.