Rumination and Psychopathology: Are Anger and Depressive Rumination Differentially Associated with Internalizing and Externalizing Psychopathology?

Existing literature on rumination has predominately focused on depressive rumination; thus, there is little research directly comparing different forms of rumination as correlates of psychopathological outcomes. The present study investigated anger and depressive rumination as correlates of internalizing and externalizing psychopathology. Cross-sectional confirmatory factor analyses on data from 764 young adults from the Colorado Longitudinal Twin Study indicated that anger and depressive rumination were separable at the latent variable level, and were both associated with lifetime symptoms of internalizing and externalizing psychopathology. However, depressive rumination was more strongly associated with psychopathology than was anger rumination. Further analysis indicated that depressive rumination was independently associated with internalizing psychopathology, whereas associations between anger rumination and psychopathology were predominately due to shared variance with depressive rumination. Anger rumination was independently associated with externalizing psychopathology in women and was inversely associated with internalizing psychopathology in men. This result supports the clinical relevance of ruminative thought processes and the potential differential utility of anger and depressive content for understanding internalizing and externalizing psychopathology.